Welcome to HelloFelix.com, my official research website and a new resource for parents who are interested in understanding more about the science of child development. Since this is my first blog post, I thought I’d begin by simply introducing myself, and talking a bit about my developmental psychology research and this website.
To begin with the basics: I’m a doctoral student in the Yale Psychology department, where I study the way that preschool-aged children think and learn. More specifically, my research focuses on social learning and imitation, something that is at once familiar to anyone who has ever spent any time with children and also a really fascinating scientific puzzle.
It’s true – imitation is very much a current scientific puzzle, and not at all a “simple” form of learning in the way that the old saying “monkey see, monkey do” would seem to suggest. The truth is that imitation is one of the most unique and specialized forms of learning that humans engage in. In fact, though there is some controversy around the margins, it seems fairly clear at this point that no other species besides humans – not even our clever monkey friends – imitates in any kind of general, systematic way. We are unique in our mastery of this sophisticated and powerful means of learning about the world.
So what exactly can one study about imitation? In my case, I’m particularly interested in the way that kids treat imitation as a specially privileged source of information about the numerous new objects, artifacts, gadgets, and tools that they come across each day. It seems that when children see an adult operating an unfamiliar object, they may use what the adult does to automatically construct a simple theory of how that object works. The interesting thing about this theory construction is that it seems to happen so rapidly and automatically that it is essentially beneath the child’s level of conscious awareness – they wind up with very firm intuitions about the way the object functions without feeling as though they deliberately thought it through; they simply absorb it from observing the adult’s behavior. And importantly, every once in a while, these theories can turn out to be wrong in a way that has really fascinating implications. I’ll be talking about this particular topic, and the curious phenomenon of overimitation that it gives rise to, much more in the coming weeks.
So what’s this website for? Well, in the course of running my studies in numerous preschools throughout Connecticut, I’ve had a chance to field lots of interesting questions from parents and teachers regarding what one might call the “science of being a kid”, or our scientific understanding of how children learn, reason, and grow cognitively. It’s a fascinating topic, but it’s not one that’s very easy for most parents to find reliable information about. To be sure there is no shortage of “pop” developmental psychology out there, but there really aren’t any good resources for parents who want to understand more about the current state-of-the-art in our scientific understanding of childhood development and learning. The purpose of this website is to bridge that gap. Developmental and cognitive psychologists know a remarkable amount about how kids “tick”, and I hope that this site will be a great resource for interested parents who want to find out more about it.
Obviously this is a new endeavor, and I warmly welcome your input and suggestions. You can comment on blog posts using the “Comment” link that appears at the end of each, and you can also use this contact page to send me (or Felix for that matter, the distinguished orangutan whom I will introduce shortly) an email.
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