User:Biodudette/Laura Schulz

Schulz's research focuses on children's cognition, specifically how children begin to form their world-views from the facets of information they obtain everyday. Her work focuses on three main topics within child cognition. One of the topics is how children process the information they've gained in order to better infer, interact, and explain the world around them. Another topic is on the factors that allows children express curiosity and explore their environment, which also allow them to strengthen their cognition. Finally, how the information gained from the previous points will interact with one another to form their social cognition and ultimately build their sense of self and their interactions with others. Her data and observations come from two laboratories, one at the Boston Children’s Museum and the other at the Discovery Center in the Museum of Science, Boston. At these laboratories she uses infant-looking time methods and free-play paradigms, as well as other methods, to study babies and children. She choses to observe these subjects in particular, because in order to understand the origins of knowledge and fundamental principles of learning in humans, one must start at the beginning when babies have limited prior knowledge.

As of 2020, she has 95 publications including articles, data, and papers, 20 of which were completed during her time at The Center for Brains, Minds and Machines (CBMM) at MIT. In March of 2015 she gave a TED talk called "The surprisingly logical minds of babies" which has since had almost 2 million views.