Susan Carey
American cognitive and developmental psychologist of conceptual change
American psychologist at Harvard who studies how children's concepts change. She coined the term fast mapping with Elsa Bartlett, wrote Conceptual Change in Childhood and The Origin of Concepts, and worked on core cognition with Elizabeth Spelke.
Why this person matters
Carey connects children's conceptual development with theory change in science. She did graduate work at Harvard with Jerome Bruner and Roger Brown, and her work on word learning and core cognition engages both Piaget and nativist accounts.
Main contributions
Fast mapping (1978)
With Elsa Bartlett she coined the term for learning a word's meaning from a single exposure.
Conceptual change
Conceptual Change in Childhood (1985) examines how children's concepts change. She argues that conceptual change in children resembles theory change in science and draws on historical case studies as well as studies with infants and children.
Core cognition and bootstrapping
With Elizabeth Spelke she developed the proposal that infants start with core systems for objects, agents and number. The Origin of Concepts (2009) introduced Quinian bootstrapping, a theory of how complex concepts are built from simpler ones.
Context and limits
Medin and colleagues (2010) argued that the anthropomorphic thinking described in young children is not universal and depends on culture and experience. Quinian bootstrapping has been examined by other researchers, for example Jacob Beck in 2017. The sources read give no detailed account of these debates.
In your introductory course
Lifespan development.Appears in the development and cognition chapters in word learning, children's biological concepts and core knowledge.
Related course reading: Psychology 2e, section 9.1. This is course context rather than a biographical source.
Years of active work
- 1971
Received her PhD in experimental psychology from Harvard.
- 1978
Coined fast mapping with Elsa Bartlett.
- 1985
Published Conceptual Change in Childhood.
- 2009
Published The Origin of Concepts.
Sources
- Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues, Dickinson College, Susan CareyUniversity. Institutional biography inspected.
- Harvard Gazette, Toddling toward the birth of knowledge (2001; Carey as Spelke's Harvard colleague)University. Institutional biography inspected.
- Wikipedia, Susan CareyReference work. Reference article inspected.