3304P Benjamin Building
Phone: (301) 314-1815
E-mail: lpbutler@umd.edu
Dr. Butler’s research focuses on the development and consequences of social learning in early childhood. His research explores the interplay between two critical components of early learning: the capacity to learn important information about the world by making inductive inferences on the basis of limited evidence, and the ability to flexibly and selectively learn from others. By investigating this interplay across several important areas of learning—causal reasoning, inductive generalization, categorization, and normative judgment—as well as over the course of development, we hope to generate broad conclusions about how early cognitive development is fundamentally shaped both by the social context in which it occurs, and by children’s developing social cognitive capacities. This research focuses on children 2 to 6 years of age.