Charles Kalish
PhD, University of Michigan
Professor, Educational Psychology

Contact Information:
880b Educational Sciences
1025 W Johnson St
Madison, WI 53706
Phone: (608) 262-9920
E-mail: cwkalish@wisc.edu

Research Statement

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. In this work we are studying how children evaluate evidence. One specific focus is the influence of sampling procedures; are judgments sensitive to different ways of selecting examples?

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.

Representative Publications

Kalish, C. W., & Lawson, C. A. (2008). Development of social category representations: Early appreciation of roles and deontic relations. Child Development, 79 , 577-593

Kalish, C. W., & Cornelius, R. (2007). What is to be done? Childrens ascriptions of conventional obligations. Child Development, 78 , 859-878.

Zhu, X., Rogers, T. R., Qian, R., & Kalish, C. W. (2007). Humans perform semi-supervised learning too. In Twenty-Second AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-07)

Kalish, C. W., & Lawson, C. A. (2007). Negative evidence and inductive generalization. Thinking & Reasoning, 13, 394-425.