The Cognition and Development Lab is comprised of two labs led by Lucas Butler and Richard Prather. The contact information for each lab is listed below.
Butler Lab
3304P Benjamin Building
Phone: (301) 314-1815
E-mail: lpbutler@umd.edu
The earth is flat. Vaccines cause autism. Heavier objects fall faster. Boys are better than girls at math. What makes each of these claims similar? Each, while theoretically possible and in some cases even intuitive, is empirically false. A pressing issue facing society is ensuring a populace that approaches the world with a critical, evaluative lens: able to assess whether a wide variety of claims are supported by sufficient data; to understand when to dig deeper to better understand a problem, and how best to do so. These are empirical habits of mind, and form the foundation not only of scientific literacy, but of critical engagement across many aspects of modern life. As they become members of a society increasingly inundated with information, with eroding and sometimes insufficient institutional checks on what is authoritatively true, it is crucial to ensure that our children develop these empirical habits of mind.
To this end, our research program focuses on the development of children’s empirical reasoning. We investigate how and when children develop the empirical reasoning skills necessary to navigate this information-rich, complex world, and how this development is shaped and fostered by often subtle aspects of the social context in which it occurs. Our research program broadly comprises two interrelated lines of investigation. First, we investigate how children engage in the empirical process themselves. This includes investigating what factors influence how children identify the specific learning opportunities presented in a given situation, how they use social cues to guide the process of making inductive inferences, and how this varies across contexts and domains. Second, we investigate how children evaluate others’ empirical practices. This includes investigating how children evaluate whether others’ empirical claims are based on sufficient evidence, how that empirical reasoning is integrated with and affected by their understanding of other people and their goals, motives, and social connections, and children’s understanding of scientific principles such as transparency, integrity, and reproducibility.