Susan Carey

Susan Carey (born 1942) is an American psychologist and professor of psychology at Harvard University who studies how children acquire language and concepts and how their understanding changes over time. She took her undergraduate degree at Radcliffe College and her doctorate in experimental psychology at Harvard in 1971, taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1972 to 1996 and at New York University before returning to Harvard in 2001. With Elsa Bartlett she coined the term fast mapping for learning a word meaning from a single exposure, and her book Conceptual Change in Childhood, published in 1985, reconciled Jean Piaget on animism with later work on children's biological knowledge. She received the David E. Rumelhart Prize in 2009, the first woman to do so, and the Atkinson Prize in 2020.