Nature & Nurture #93: Dr. Deon Benton - Is Learning Innate?

Dr. Deon Benton is an Assistant Professor of Psychology and Human Development at Vanderbilt University, where he runs the Computational Cognitive Development Lab.

In this episode we talk about the interacting forces of nature and nurture that give rise to human children’s tremendous ability for learning, language development, causal reasoning, and social cognition. Deon describes his past and future research on cognitive development in infants and young children, as well as experimental paradigms for how to measure infant attention, such as through eye-tracking. We talk about how infant statistical learning can be modeled computationally, and the difficulties of decoupling innate knowledge about the physical and social world from learning in the postnatal or even prenatal environments. Lastly, Deon advocates for the importance of designing effective early-intervention studies to improve life outcomes for young children exposed to adversity.

Learn more about Deon’s work at: https://theccdlab.com/