Susan A. Gelman (born July 24, 1957) is currently Heinz Werner Distinguished University Professor of
psychology and
linguistics and the director of the Conceptual Development Laboratory at the
University of Michigan.[1]
Gelman studies language and concept development in young children.[2][3]
Gelman subscribes to the
domain specificity view of
cognition, which asserts that the mind is composed of specialized
modules supervising specific functions in the human and other animals.[4][5][6] Her book The Essential Child is an influential work on cognitive development.
Gelman is currently the Heinz Werner Distinguished University Professor of
psychology and
linguistics and the director of the Conceptual Development Laboratory at the
University of Michigan.[1]
She was previously the Frederick G. L. Huetwell professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.[15]
Research
Gelman directs the Conceptual Development Lab in the Psychology Department of the
University of Michigan. Most of the studies conducted at the lab focus on children between the ages of 2 and 10, and are carried out in a home-like laboratory setting or in local preschools and middle schools.[16]
Banaji, Mahzarin R.; Gelman, Susan A., eds. (2013). Navigating the social world : what infants, children, and other species can teach us. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
ISBN9780199361069.
Hirschfeld, L. A.; Gelman, S. A., eds. (1994). Mapping the Mind : Domain Specificity in Cognition and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
ISBN9780511752902.
Essentialism
Gelman has been a major contributor to
essentialism and relating essentialist ideas to varying aspects in psychology. Gelman's work within the two fields share a familiar subsection: development of children. Her work has established that children, within a given age range, are able to detect underlying essences or root causes for predicting observed behaviors. Gelman's work has yielded insights into how children acquire language. Her book The Essential Child: Origins of Essentialism in Everyday Thought is an influential work on cognitive development and essentialism that has been cited more than 2000 times.[19]
^
ab"Susan Gelman". University of Michigan. Retrieved 8 November 2021.
^Foster-Hanson, E.; Leslie, S.J. (2016). "How does generic language elicit essentialist beliefs?". In Rhodes, M.; Papafragou, A.; Grodner, D.; Mirman, D.; Trueswell, J.C. (eds.).
Proceedings of the 38th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society(PDF). Philadelphia, PA: Cognitive Science Society. Retrieved 8 November 2021.
^Smith, Michael Sharwood; Truscott, John (2014). The Multilingual Mind: A Modular Processing Perspective. Cambridge University Press. p. 30.
ISBN9781107729605.
^Carey, Susan (2011). The Origin of Concepts. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 272, 383.
^
ab"Susan A. Gelman". American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Retrieved 2 June 2021.
^Wellman, Henry M.; Ornstein, Peter A.; Woodward, Amanda; Uttal, David (2017). "History of the Cognitive Development Society: The First 16 Years". Journal of Cognition and Development. 18 (3): 392–397.
doi:
10.1080/15248372.2016.1276915.
S2CID151490715.
^Gelman, Andrew (14 July 2006).
"Uncle Woody". Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.
Archived from the original on 25 December 2018. Retrieved 5 July 2018.