Tamar Kushnir is an Assistant Professor of Human Development, and the director of the Early Childhood Cognition Laboratory. She received her M.A. in Statistics and Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from the
Dr. Kushnir's research examines the remarkable process of causal learning in young children. Her previous work has addressed 1)how children use statistical evidence to learn new causal relations, 2)how new evidence interacts with children's prior causal beliefs, and 3)how causal learning is influenced by children's developing social knowledge and also by their own experience of action. She continues to explore the role that children's developing knowledge - in particular their social knowledge - plays in learning, a question with implications for the study of cognitive development as well as for early childhood education.
1996 B.A. in Psychology, Magna Cum Laude
2004 MA in Statistics
Advisor: David Brillinger, Ph.D.
2005 Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology
Thesis: Children and Adults Reason About Causal Uncertainty.
Advisor: Alison Gopnik, Ph.D.
Kushnir, T.,
Wellman, H. M. & Gelman, S. A.(in press).
A self-agency bias in children’s causal inferences. Developmental Psychology.
Kushnir, T., Xu, F,
& Wellman, H. M. (2008). Preschoolers use sampling information to infer the
preferences of others. Proceedings of the 30th Annual Meeting of
the Cognitive Science Society.
Legare, C. H., Gelman, S. A, Wellman, H. M. & Kushnir, T. (2008). The function of
causal explanatory reasoning. Proceedings of the 30th Annual
Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.
Kushnir, T.,
Wellman, H. M. & Gelman, S. A.(2008).
The role of preschoolers’ social understanding in evaluating the
informativeness of causal interventions. Cognition.
Kushnir, T. &
Gopnik, A. (2007). Conditional
probability versus spatial contiguity in causal learning: Preschoolers use new
contingency evidence to overcome prior spatial assumptions. Developmental Psychology, 44, 186-196.
Schulz, L. E., Kushnir,
T., & Gopnik, A. (2007). Learning from doing: Interventions and causal
inference. In A. Gopnik & L. E.
Schulz (Eds.), Causal Learning; Psychology, Philosophy and Computation, 67-86.
Sobel, D. M. & Kushnir, T. (2006). The importance of decision-making in causal learning from interventions. Memory & Cognition, 34. 411-419.
Kushnir T. & Gopnik, A., (2005). Children infer causal strength from probabilities and interventions. Psychological Science, 16, 678-683.
Gopnik, A., Glymour, C., Sobel, D., Schulz, L. E., Kushnir, T., & Danks, D. (2004). A theory of causal learning in children: Causal maps and Bayes nets. Psychological Review, 111(1), 3-32