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Fei Xu (徐绯)(born 1969) is Chinese-born developmental psychologist, a professor of psychology and the director of the Berkeley Early Learning Lab at the University of California, Berkeley. She is most known for her Bayesian approach to early learning.

Biography
After finishing high school in China, Xu moved to the United States for college. She received her B.A. in Cognitive Science from Smith College in 1991 and a Ph.D. in Cognitive Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1995 under the guidance of Susan Carey and Steven Pinker. After finishing her degree, Xu was a postdoctoral fellow at University of Pennsylvania, Rutgers University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology under Alan M. Leslie. She went on to teach at Northeastern University and the University of British Columbia at Vancouver.

She joined the faculty at University of California, Berkeley in 2009, where she is currently a Professor of Psychology. She is also the director of the Berkeley Early Learning Lab.

Awards and Honors
Xu is a former Canada Research Chair, a grant given to extraordinary emerging researchers by the Canadian government.

In 2006, she was awarded the Stanton Prize by the Society for Philosophy and Psychology.

In 2018, she became a Guggenheim Fellow for the field of psychology.

She is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and is a member of the editorial board for Psychological Science.

In 2020, Xu became a fellow of the Society of Experimental Psychologists.

Research
The main themes of Xu's research are cognitive and language development in infants and children. Her early work has looked at how infants parsed objects into "sortals" (i.e., kinds) and on the different experiences of monolingual and bilingual children. Subsequent work developed into a body of research related to learning models of infants and children. Much of Xu's recent work has focused on a rational constructivist approach to cognitive development, a view that characterizes the early experiences of learners as rational and inferential. In this view, early learners have an understanding of the way the world works based on past experiences and they will attempt to interact with the work in a manner consistent with their previous understanding; a domain-general mechanism. The success or failure of these attempts gives rise to increasingly nuanced ideas about the way the world functions, eventually turning into domain-specific understanding. Several lines of research related to this model are studied at the Berkeley Early Learning Lab.

Her work has been mentioned in Nature, the Wall Street Journal , the Globe and Mail , and NBC News.

Xu has had several academic children including Stephanie Denison and Jane Hu.

Representative publications

 * Xu, F. (2019). Towards a rational constructivist theory of cognitive development. Psychological Review, 126(6), 841–864. https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000153
 * Xu, F. & Garcia, V. (2008). Intuitive statistics by 8-month-old infants. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105 (13), 5012-5015    https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0704450105
 * Xu, F. & Spelke, E.S. (2000). Large number discrimination in 6-month-old infants. Cognition 74 (1), B1-B11  https://doi.org/10.1016/S0010-0277(99)00066-9
 * Xu, F., & Tenenbaum, J. B. (2007). Word learning as Bayesian inference. Psychological Review, 114(2), 245–272. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.114.2.245