Associate Professor
Department of Psychology
University of Chicago
5848 S. University Ave.
Chicago, IL 60637

Research Summary

Early reasoning about human action

By early childhood, we have distinct systems of knowledge to guide our reasoning about the motions of inanimate objects and the actions of people. In my research, I ask whether the seeds of these abilities are present in early infancy, and how this knowledge develops during the first year of life. In prior studies, I have assessed infants' encoding of an event in which an actor performs a simple goal directed action, reaching for and grasping a toy. The results of these studies indicate that: (1) Six- and nine-month-old infants selectively encode the goal object of such events over other salient spatiotemporal properties; (2) Infants distinguish between animate and inanimate actors in doing this; and, (3) Infants do not selectively encode the contacted object for all events in which a person touches an object. Instead, their encoding of action seems to change as they learn about particular acts. In current work, my students and I are exploring the range of actions that infants construe as goal directed, infants' ability to understand links between actions that are sequenced in service of the same overall goal, and infants' ability to interpret novel actions based on past events.

Early word learning

By the end of the first year of life, infants have begun to acquire word-world linkages. That is, they begin to act as if they understand what some words mean, and can sometimes produce words. In prior work, my collaborators and I found that infants as young as 13 months can learn a new word-object linkage after only brief training in the lab. In current work, I am exploring this early learning ability, assessing the role of early social knowledge in this learning as well as testing when and how infants develop a set of expectations about words as a distinct kind of social signal.

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Bio

Professor Amanda Woodward received her B.A. in Psychology with high honors from Swarthmore College in 1987 and her Ph.D. in Psychology from Stanford University in 1992. She spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University, and then joined the faculty of the University of Chicago in 1993. She was promoted to Associate Professor with indefinite tenure in 1999. Professor Woodward's research has been recognized by several awards, including the John Merck Fund Young Scholars Award (1994), the Division 7 American Psychological Association Boyd McCandless Award for an Early Career Contribution to Developmental Psychology (2000) and the Neubauer Faculty development Fellowship in the College, University of Chicago (2001). Her current research is supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health and the Robert R. McCormick Tribune Foundation.

In addition to her work as a researcher, Professor Woodward teaches undergraduate and doctoral students at the University, serves as the chair of the Psychology DepartmentÕs Curriculum Committee, and is a member of the Psychology DepartmentÕs Steering Committee. She also serves as an editorial consultant or reviewer for a number of scientific journals and granting agencies.

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Selected publications

Woodward, A. L. (in press). Infant cognition. In The Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science. Nature Publishing Group.

Woodward, A. L. (in press). Infants' developing understanding of the link between looker and object. Developmental Science.

Woodward, A. L. (in press). Infants' understanding of the actions involved in joint attention. In N. Eilan, C. Hoerl, T. McCormack and J. Roessler (eds.) Joint attention: Communication and other minds. Oxford University Press.

Woodward, A. L. (in press). Infants' use of action knowledge to get a grasp on words. To appear in D. G. Hall and S. R. Waxman (eds.) Weaving a lexicon. MIT Press.

Woodward, A. L., & Guajardo, J. J. (2002). Infants' understanding of the point gesture as an object-directed action. Cognitive Development, 83, 1-24.

Regier, T., Corrigan, B., Cabasaan, R., Woodward, A., Gasser, M., & Smith, L. (2001). The emergence of words. In J. Moore & K. Stenning. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 815-820). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Woodward, A. L., Sommerville, J. A., & Guajardo, J. J. (2001). How infants make sense of intentional action. In B. Malle, L. Moses & D. Baldwin (Eds.) Intentions and intentionality: Foundations of Social Cognition (pp.149-169). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Golinkoff, R., Hirsh-Pasek, K., Bloom, L., Hollich, G., Smith, L., Woodward, A. L., Akhtar, N., Tomasello, M. & Hollich, G. (Eds.) (2000). Becoming a word learner: A debate on lexical acquisition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Woodward, A. L. (2000). Constraining the problem space in early word learning. In R. Golinkoff, K. Hirsh-Pasek, N. Bloom, G. Hollich, L. Smith, A. L. Woodward, Akhtar, L., Tomasello, M., & Hollich, G. (Eds.) Becoming a word learner: A debate on lexical acquisition.(pp. 81-114). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Woodward, A. L. (2000). There is no silver bullet for word learning: Why monolithic accounts miss the mark. In R. Golinkoff, K. Hirsh-Pasek, N. Bloom, G. Hollich, L. Smith, A. L. Woodward, Akhtar, L., Tomasello, M., & Hollich, G. (Eds.) Becoming a word learner: A debate on lexical acquisition.(pp. 174-179). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Woodward, A. L., & Sommerville, J. A. (2000). Twelve-month-old infants interpret action in context, Psychological Science, 11, 73-76.

Couillard, N. L., & Woodward, A. L. (1999). Children's comprehension of deceptive points. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 17, 515-521.

Woodward, A. L. (1999). Infants' ability to distinguish between purposeful and non-purposeful behaviors, Infant Behavior and Development, 22, 145-160.

Woodward, A. L. & Hoyne, K. L. (1999). Infants' learning about words and sounds in relation to objects. Child Development, 70, 65-77.

Woodward, A. L. (1998). Infants selectively encode the goal object of an actor's reach. Cognition, 69, 1-34.

Woodward, A. L. & Markman, E. M. (1998). Early word learning. In W. Damon, D. Kuhn & R. Siegler, (Eds.) Handbook of child psychology, Volume 2: Cognition, perception and language (pp. 371-420). New York: John Wiley and Sons.

Spelke, E. S., Phillips, A. T. & Woodward, A. L. (1995). Infants' knowledge of object motion and human action. In A.J. Premack, D. Premack & D. Sperber (Eds.) Causal cognition: A multidisciplinary debate (pp.44-77). Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Woodward, A. L., Markman, E. M. & Fitzsimmons, C. M. (1994). Rapid word learning in 13- and 18-month-olds. Developmental Psychology, 30, 553-566.

Woodward, A. L. (1993). The effect of labeling on children's attention to objects. In E. V. Clark (Ed.). Proceedings of the 24th Annual Child Language Research Forum (pp.35-47). Stanford, CA: CSLI.

Woodward, A. L., Phillips, A. T. & Spelke, E. S. (1993). Infants' expectations about the motion of animate versus inanimate objects. Proceedings of the Fifteenth Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1087-1091). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Woodward, A. L. & Markman, E.M. (1991). Constraints on learning as default assumptions: Comments on Merriman and Bowman's "The mutual exclusivity bias in children's word learning." Developmental Review, 11, 137-163.

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Table of Contents

Research Summary

Bio

Selected publications