Alison Gopnik

Alison Gopnik (born 1955) is an American professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, known for her work on cognitive and language development, including the effect of language on thought, the development of a theory of mind and causal learning. She earned a B.A. in psychology and philosophy at McGill University in 1975 and a D.Phil. in experimental psychology at the University of Oxford in 1980, and joined the Berkeley faculty in 1988 after working at the University of Toronto. She has applied Bayesian networks to human learning, building mathematical models of how children learn that could also inform artificial intelligence, and she advocates the theory theory, the idea that children use the same mechanisms as scientists to develop causal models of their environment. She wrote The Scientist in the Crib with Andrew Meltzoff and Patricia Kuhl, was the Mind and Matter columnist of the Wall Street Journal from 2013 to 2023, and was president of the Association for Psychological Science in 2022 to 2023.