Charles Kalish Ph.D., University of Michigan Professor, Educational Psychology Contact Information Waisman Center UW-Madison 1500 Highland Avenue Madison, WI 53705 608-263-3600 E-mail: cwkalish@wisc.edu Web: http://corundum.education.wisc.edu/ The Study of Children's Thinking

My research focuses on inductive inference and causal reasoning-how do we predict the future and learn from experience? One line of research focuses on how children acquire the set of commonsense beliefs that characterize adult thinking.  Current research explores the role of norms in social cognition. How does children's understanding of rules and obligations develop, and what role does such understanding play in predicting and explaining people's behavior? A second line of research addresses more general processes of categorization and inference. I explore how people use evidence to make category-based inductions, and how beliefs about the nature and origins of categories affect learning and judgment. The ability to generalize past experience to new situations, to make inductive inferences, is central to what we think of as learning. We want children not just to be able to solve familiar problems, but also to know how to apply their knowledge in new circumstances. I hope that studying the process of generalization will tell us more about how children learn. Gelman, S. A., & Kalish, C. W. (forthcoming). Conceptual Development. In D. Kuhn & R. Siegler (Eds.), Handbook of Child Psychology. Kalish, C. W. (in press). Becoming status conscious: Children's appreciation of social reality. Philosophical Explorations. Lawson, C. A., & Kalish, C. W. (in press). Inductive Inferences Across Time and Identity: Are Category Members More Alike Than Single Individuals? Journal of Cognition and Development. Kalish, C. W. & Shiverick, S. A. (2004). Rules and Preferences: Children's Reasoning About Motives for Behavior. Cognitive Development, 19, 401-416. Kalish, C. W. (2002). Children's Predictions of Consistency in People's Actions. Cognition, 84, 237-265. Kalish, C. W. (2002). Essentialist to some degree: The structure of natural kind categories. Memory & Cognition, 30, 340-352.   Click to search National Library of Medicine and PubMed for other publications by Dr. Kalish

Last updated 1/19/2006 by rowley@waisman.wisc.edu