The Making of a Mind

Arizona

On March 23, 2010, Dr. LouAnn Gerken, Professor, Psychology and Director, Cognitive Science, presented "The Making of a Mind" as the fourth public lecture in the University of Arizona College of Science's Mind and Brain Lecture Series.

We're all born with a brain, but when does our brain begin to construct a model of the world a mind? Research now suggests that infants not only absorb a remarkable amount of information about the physical and social world, they also use this information much like scientists to make guesses about the structure of that world. By creating tentative models of different aspects of the world based on very small amounts of data, infants use their developing models to predict the behavior of objects, people and the world around them.