Alison Gopnik | Academic Influence

Alison Gopnik's AcademicInfluence.com Rankings

Alison Gopnik

Psychology

#264

World Rank

#382

Historical Rank

#179

USA Rank

Developmental Psychology

#18

World Rank

#20

Historical Rank

#13

USA Rank

Cognitive Psychology

#71

World Rank

#73

Historical Rank

#32

USA Rank

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Psychology

Alison Gopnik's Degrees

Bachelors Psychology McGill University

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Why Is Alison Gopnik Influential?

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According to Wikipedia, Alison Gopnik is an American professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. She is known for her work in the areas of cognitive and language development, specializing in the effect of language on thought, the development of a theory of mind, and causal learning. Her writing on psychology and cognitive science has appeared in Science, Scientific American, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, New Scientist, Slate and others. Her body of work also includes four books and over 100 journal articles.

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Alison Gopnik's Published Works

Number of citations in a given year to any of this author's works

Total number of citations to an author for the works they published in a given year. This highlights publication of the most important work(s) by the author

Published Works

Words, thoughts, and theories (1997) (1380)
Children's understanding of representational change and its relation to the understanding of false belief and the appearance-reality distinction. (1988) (1257)
A theory of causal learning in children: causal maps and Bayes nets. (2004) (1030)
Why the Child's Theory of Mind Really Is a Theory (1992) (983)
Early reasoning about desires: evidence from 14- and 18-month-olds. (1997) (829)
How we know our minds: The illusion of first-person knowledge of intentionality (1993) (757)
Cultural learning. Author's reply (1993) (745)
The theory theory. (1994) (653)
Reconstructing constructivism: causal models, Bayesian learning mechanisms, and the theory theory. (2012) (485)
Causal learning mechanisms in very young children: two-, three-, and four-year-olds infer causal relations from patterns of variation and covariation. (2001) (432)
Causal learning : psychology, philosophy, and computation (2007) (407)
Knowing How You Know: Young Children's Ability to Identify and Remember the Sources of Their Beliefs. (1988) (403)
Young Children's Understanding of Changes in Their Mental States. (1991) (384)
The scientist in the crib : minds, brains, and how children learn (1999) (381)
Detecting blickets: how young children use information about novel causal powers in categorization and induction. (2000) (346)
Theoretical explanations of children's understanding of the mind (1991) (330)
Children's causal inferences from indirect evidence: Backwards blocking and Bayesian reasoning in preschoolers (2004) (321)
Early acquisition of verbs in Korean: a cross-linguistic study (1995) (311)
The Development of Categorization in the Second Year and Its Relation to Other Cognitive and Linguistic Developments. (1987) (291)
Scientific Thinking in Young Children: Theoretical Advances, Empirical Research, and Policy Implications (2012) (286)
Young Children's Ability to Identify the Sources of Their Beliefs. (1991) (269)
The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind (2000) (261)
Mechanisms of theory formation in young children (2004) (213)
Preschool children learn about causal structure from conditional interventions. (2007) (213)
Causal learning across domains. (2004) (208)
Children’s imitation of causal action sequences is influenced by statistical and pedagogical evidence (2011) (203)
The Scientist as Child (1996) (195)
Minds, bodies, and persons: Young children's understanding of the self and others as reflected in imitation and theory of mind research (1994) (189)
Conceptual coherence in the child's theory of mind: training children to understand belief. (1996) (178)
Changes in cognitive flexibility and hypothesis search across human life history from childhood to adolescence to adulthood (2017) (175)
Explanation as Orgasm* (1998) (173)
Names, relational words, and cognitive development in English and Korean speakers: Nouns are not always learned before verbs. (1995) (170)
When children are better (or at least more open-minded) learners than adults: Developmental differences in learning the forms of causal relationships (2014) (168)
Young Children Infer Causal Strength From Probabilities and Interventions (2005) (166)
The scientist in the crib (1999) (158)
Conditional probability versus spatial contiguity in causal learning: Preschoolers use new contingency evidence to overcome prior spatial assumptions. (2007) (151)
Conceptual and Semantic Development as Theory Change: The Case of Object Permanence (1988) (148)
Infants learn about objects from statistics and people. (2011) (143)
Relations between Semantic and Cognitive Development in the One-Word Stage: The Specificity Hypothesis. (1986) (137)
The power of possibility: causal learning, counterfactual reasoning, and pretend play (2012) (135)
When Younger Learners Can Be Better (or at Least More Open-Minded) Than Older Ones (2015) (131)
Toddlers' understanding of intentions, desires and emotions: Explorations of the dark ages. (1999) (123)
Words and plans: early language and the development of intelligent action (1982) (123)
Linguistic and cognitive abilities in infancy: when does language become a tool for categorization? (2001) (122)
Cross-linguistic Differences in Early Semantic and Cognitive Development. (1996) (120)
Bayesian networks, Bayesian learning and cognitive development. (2007) (118)
Win-Stay, Lose-Sample: A simple sequential algorithm for approximating Bayesian inference (2014) (118)
Do linguistic differences lead to cognitive differences? A cross-linguistic study of semantic and cognitive development (1990) (117)
Intuitive Theories of Mind: A Rational Approach to False Belief (2005) (112)
Categorization and Naming: Basic-Level Sorting in Eighteen-Month-Olds and Its Relation to Language (1992) (110)
Rational variability in children’s causal inferences: The Sampling Hypothesis (2013) (106)
The ontogeny of common sense. (1988) (103)
Just do it? Investigating the gap between prediction and action in toddlers’ causal inferences (2010) (99)
The Philosophical Baby: What Children's Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life (2009) (93)
How babies think. (2010) (90)
Developing the Idea of Intentionality: Children's Theories of Mind (1990) (90)
Bayes and Blickets: Effects of Knowledge on Causal Induction in Children and Adults (2011) (89)
Toddlers Infer Higher-Order Relational Principles in Causal Learning (2014) (89)
The Blicket Within: Preschoolers' Inferences About Insides and Causes (2007) (89)
The Theory Theory as an Alternative to the Innateness Hypothesis (2008) (88)
Explaining prompts children to privilege inductively rich properties (2014) (87)
Childhood as a solution to explore–exploit tensions (2020) (87)
Duck or rabbit? Reversing ambiguous figures and understanding ambiguous representations. (2001) (86)
Learning about causes from people: observational causal learning in 24-month-old infants. (2012) (86)
Probabilistic models, learning algorithms, and response variability: sampling in cognitive development (2014) (80)
A shift in children’s use of perceptual and causal cues to categorization (2000) (80)
Theories of theories of mind: Theories and modules: creation myths, developmental realities, and Neurath's boat (1996) (79)
Did she jump because she was the big sister or because the trampoline was safe? Causal inference and the development of social attribution. (2013) (76)
Pretense, Counterfactuals, and Bayesian Causal Models: Why What Is Not Real Really Matters (2013) (76)
Developing intuitions about free will between ages four and six (2015) (74)
Learning to learn from stories: children's developing sensitivity to the causal structure of fictional worlds. (2015) (70)
The Child as Econometrician: A Rational Model of Preference Understanding in Children (2014) (69)
Semantic and cognitive development in 15- to 21-month-old children (1984) (69)
Causal maps and Bayes nets: A cognitive and computational account of theory-formation (2002) (63)
How Babies Think : The Science of Childhood (2000) (59)
Whose concepts are they, anyway? The role of philosophical intuition in empirical psychology (1998) (58)
Conceptual and semantic change in scientists and children: why there are no semantic universals (1983) (58)
Source Monitoring Reduces the Suggestibility of Preschool Children (2002) (53)
Do Young Children Reverse Ambiguous Figures? (1994) (53)
Words, Plans, Things, and Locations: Interactions Between Semantic and Cognitive Development in the One-Word Stage (1986) (52)
Ambiguous figure perception and theory of mind understanding in children with autistic spectrum disorders (2005) (52)
The acquisition of gone and the development of the object concept (1984) (48)
Language acquisition and conceptual development: Theories, language, and culture:Whorf without wincing (2001) (48)
Explaining Constrains Causal Learning in Childhood. (2017) (47)
Three types of early word: the emergence of social words, names and cognitive-relational words in the one-word stage and their relation to cognitive development (1988) (45)
The Future of Women in Psychological Science (2020) (44)
Imitation, cultural learning and the origins of “theory of mind” (1993) (44)
Causal learning from probabilistic events in 24-month-olds: an action measure. (2015) (43)
The Post-Piaget Era (1996) (43)
Ensemble perception of size in 4-5-year-old children. (2014) (43)
Inferring Hidden Causes (2003) (43)
Bayesian models of child development. (2015) (42)
The Development of Structural Thinking About Social Categories (2018) (40)
The early emergence and puzzling decline of relational reasoning: Effects of knowledge and search on inferring abstract concepts (2016) (39)
Evaluating Theory of Mind in Question Answering (2018) (38)
Considering Counterfactuals: The Relationship between Causal Learning and Pretend Play (2013) (37)
Inferring Hidden Causal Structure (2009) (37)
Inferring action structure and causal relationships in continuous sequences of human action (2015) (35)
Learning from doing: Intervention and causal inference (2007) (35)
Children's causal inferences from conflicting testimony and observations. (2016) (34)
Words, Kinds and Causal Powers: a Theory Theory Perspective on Early Naming and Categorization (2003) (34)
How Universal Are Free Will Beliefs? Cultural Differences in Chinese and U.S. 4- and 6-Year-Olds. (2016) (33)
On Linking Nonverbal Imitation, Representation, and Language Learning in the First Two Years of Life (1989) (33)
Pretense and possibility--a theoretical proposal about the effects of pretend play on development: comment on Lillard et al. (2013). (2013) (31)
Discriminating relational and perceptual judgments: Evidence from human toddlers (2017) (30)
From people, to plans, to objects: Changes in the meaning of early words and their relation to cognitive development (1985) (29)
Words and thoughts in infancy: the specificity hypothesis and the development of categorization and naming (1993) (29)
Of babies and birds: complex tool behaviours are not sufficient for the evolution of the ability to create a novel causal intervention (2014) (29)
Theories and illusions (1993) (28)
The Social Folk Theorist: Insights from Social and Cultural Psychology on the (2001) (28)
Asynchrony in the cognitive and lexical development of young children with Williams syndrome (2005) (26)
Detecting blickets: How young children use information about causal properties in categorization and (2000) (26)
How we know our minds (1993) (24)
Distinct electrophysiological signatures of task-unrelated and dynamic thoughts (2021) (23)
Causality and Imagination (2013) (23)
Learning From Doing (2007) (23)
Could David Hume Have Known about Buddhism?: Charles François Dolu, the Royal College of La Flèche, and the Global Jesuit Intellectual Network (2009) (22)
Sorting and acting with objects in early childhood: an exploration of the use of causal cues (2003) (21)
Cognition and explanation (1998) (19)
Reversing How to Think about Ambiguous Figure Reversals: Spontaneous Alternating by Uninformed Observers (2006) (19)
Making AI More Human. (2017) (19)
The rocky road from acts to dispositions: Insights for attribution theory from developmental research on theories of mind (2001) (19)
Explaining Influences Children's Reliance on Evidence and Prior Knowledge in Causal Induction (2012) (18)
Learning about the mind from evidence: Children's development of intuitive (2013) (18)
Finding our inner scientist (2004) (18)
I know what you need to know: Children's developing theory of mind and pedagogical evidence selection (2019) (18)
Shake it baby, but only when needed: Preschoolers adapt their exploratory strategies to the information structure of the task (2019) (18)
Reversing how to think about ambiguous figure reversals: spontaneous alternating by uninformed observers. (2010) (17)
Sticking to the Evidence? A Behavioral and Computational Case Study of Micro-Theory Change in the Domain of Magnetism (2019) (16)
When children are better learners than adults: Developmental differences in learning the forms of causal relationships (2010) (16)
Learning from Actions and their Consequences: Inferring Causal Variables from Continuous Sequences of Human Action (2009) (15)
Children are more exploratory and learn more than adults in an approach-avoid task (2020) (15)
Causal Learning Across Culture and Socioeconomic Status. (2019) (14)
Do I know that you know what you know? Modeling testimony in causal inference (2012) (14)
Is that your final answer? The effects of neutral queries on children's choices (2012) (13)
Children's Theories. (1991) (12)
The future of human behaviour research (2022) (12)
Transformations and Transfer: Preschool Children Understand Abstract Relations and Reason Analogically in a Causal Task. (2020) (12)
Sensitive perception of a person's direction of walking by 4-year-old children. (2013) (12)
Learning about the mind from evidence (2013) (12)
The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children (2012) (12)
The Theory Theory 2.0: Probabilistic Models and Cognitive Development (2011) (11)
Social Cues Support Learning about Objects from Statistics in Infancy (2010) (11)
How to Help Young Children Ask Better Questions? (2021) (11)
Sticking to the Evidence? A computational and behavioral case study of micro-theory change in the domain of magnetism (2012) (11)
No conclusive evidence that corvids can create novel causal interventions (2015) (11)
Preschoolers sample from probability distributions (2010) (11)
Forschergeist in Windeln (2000) (11)
Introduction to special issue: ‘Life history and learning: how childhood, caregiving and old age shape cognition and culture in humans and other animals’ (2020) (10)
Seeing who sees: Contrastive access helps children reason about other minds (2012) (10)
Why babies are more conscious than we are (2007) (10)
Which Counterfactuals Matter? A Response to Beck (2016) (10)
Exploring Exploration: Comparing Children with RL Agents in Unified Environments (2020) (10)
Reading Minds: How Infants Come to Understand Others. (2009) (9)
Psychopsychology (1993) (9)
Learning about causes from people and about people as causes: probabilistic models and social causal reasoning. (2012) (8)
Rational Higher-Order Belief Revision in Young Children. (2018) (8)
Young Children Are Wishful Thinkers: The Development of Wishful Thinking in 3- to 10-Year-Old Children. (2020) (8)
Wanting to Get It Right: Commentary on Lillard and Joseph (1998) (8)
Children's Causal Learning from Fiction: Assessing the Proximity Between Real and Fictional Worlds (2012) (8)
A computational foundation for cognitive development: comment on Griffths et al. and McLelland et al. (2010) (7)
A unified account of abstract structure and conceptual change: Probabilistic models and early learning mechanisms (2011) (7)
A brand new ball game : Bayes net and neural net learning mechanisms in young children (2005) (7)
Learning to reason about desires: An infant training study (2015) (7)
Culture moderates the relationship between self-control ability and free will beliefs in childhood (2021) (7)
What Does "Mind-Wandering" Mean to the Folk? An Empirical Investigation (2019) (7)
Just do it? Toddlers' ability to integrate prediction and action (2010) (7)
Probabilistic models as theories of children's minds (2011) (6)
What theory of mind can teach social psychology: traits as intentional terms (2001) (6)
Computational ethics (2022) (6)
Rational randomness: the role of sampling in an algorithmic account of preschooler's causal learning. (2012) (5)
Exploiting Attention to Reveal Shortcomings in Memory Models (2018) (5)
Theories vs. Modules: To the Max and Beyond A Reply to Poulin-Dubois and to Stich and Nichols (1998) (5)
Rational constructivism: A new way to bridge rationalism and empiricism (2009) (5)
Reply to Commentators (1996) (5)
Children's Imitation of Action Sequences is Influenced by Statistical Evidence and Inferred Causal Structure (2010) (4)
How is the hypothesis space represented? Evidence from young children's active search and predictions in a multiple-cue inference task. (2020) (4)
Learning what to change: Young children use "difference-making" to identify causally relevant variables. (2019) (4)
An AI That Knows the World Like Children Do (2017) (4)
From Robot Learning To Robot Understanding: Leveraging Causal Graphical Models For Robotics (2021) (4)
The Origins and Development of Our Conception of Free Will (2014) (4)
Beyond modularity: Karmiloff-Smith, A. (1992). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, Bradford Books (1994) (4)
Questions for future research (2004) (4)
How to understand beliefs (1995) (4)
The early emergence and puzzling decline of relational reasoning: Effects of prior knowledge and search on inferring 'same' and 'different' (2015) (4)
Causal Determinism and Preschoolers' Causal Inferences (2005) (4)
Data-Mining Probabilists or Experimental Determinists ? A Dialogue on the Principles Underlying Causal Learning in Children (2009) (4)
Towards Understanding How Machines Can Learn Causal Overhypotheses (2022) (4)
Toddlers search longer when there is more information to be gained (2021) (3)
Data-mining probabilists or experimental determinists (2007) (3)
Early Semantic Developments and Their Relationship to Object Permanence, Means-Ends Understanding, and Categorization (2021) (3)
Knowing, Doing, and Talking: The Oxford Years (1990) (3)
Learning Causal Overhypotheses through Exploration in Children and Computational Models (2022) (3)
Causal learning, counterfactual reasoning and pretend play: a cross-cultural comparison of Peruvian, mixed- and low-socioeconomic status U.S. children (2022) (3)
The Relationship Between Inhibitory Control and Free Will Beliefs in 4-to 6-Year-Old-Children (2016) (3)
The development of creative search strategies (2022) (3)
Explaining to Others Prompts Children to Favor Inductively Rich Properties (2013) (2)
Preschoolers rationally sample hypotheses (2010) (2)
Causal Models and Cognitive Development (2022) (2)
Relations between thought and language in infancy (1990) (2)
When Generic Language does not Promote Psychological Essentialism (2020) (2)
Social and Emotional Development in Infancy (2011) (1)
Our Evolving View of Childhood (2010) (1)
The Developmental and Cultural Origins of Our Beliefs about Self-Control (2020) (1)
Preschoolers search longer when there is more information to be gained (2019) (1)
M. Bullowa (ed.), Before speech: the beginning of interpersonal communication Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Pp. viii + 400. (1981) (1)
Exploring Exploration: Comparing Children with Agents in Unified Exploration Environments (2020) (1)
Caregiving in Philosophy, Biology & Political Economy (2023) (1)
BAYESIAN SPECIAL SECTION: INTRODUCTION Bayesian networks, Bayesian learning and cognitive development (2007) (1)
What's intelligence got to do with it? (2006) (1)
Theories and qualities (1993) (1)
What can externalism do for psychologists? (1998) (1)
Language acquisition and the onset of relational reasoning in infants (2014) (1)
Scientists in the Crib: How Children Learn and What They Tell Us About the Mind (2001) (1)
Life history, love and learning (2019) (1)
Solutions to Fodor ’ s Puzzle of Concept Acquisition (2005) (0)
Book reviews : Language development from birth to three (1986) (0)
Cultural variability in young children's folk intuitions of free will (2014) (0)
Workshop Understanding Exploration-Exploitation Trade-offs (2018) (0)
Life History and Learning : Changes in cognitive flexibility and hypothesis search from childhood to adolescence to adulthood (2017) (0)
Why Think Causally ? (2010) (0)
Causality and Imagination Causality and Imagination (2012) (0)
Life history, love and learning (2019) (0)
Models of Human Scientific Discovery (2018) (0)
More than meets the eye: Early relational reasoning cannot be reduced to perceptual heuristics (2017) (0)
In search of a theory of learning (1984) (0)
The Origins of Common Sense in Humans and Machines (2020) (0)
Contents, Vol. 33, 1990 (1990) (0)
Running head: CAUSAL LEARNING ACROSS CULTURE AND SES Causal learning across culture and socioeconomic status (2017) (0)
Running head: PERSISTENCE IS MODULATED BY INFORMATION GAIN (2021) (0)
Identifying the structure of hypotheses that guide search during development (2018) (0)
Developmental Psychology Sensitive Perception of a Person ' s Direction of Walking by 4-Year-Old Children (2013) (0)
Curiouser and Curiouser: Children's intrinsic exploration of mazes and its effects on reaching a goal (2019) (0)
Preschoolers and Adults Learn From Novel Metaphors. (2023) (0)
causal intervention sufficient for the evolution of the ability to create a novel Of babies and birds : complex tool behaviours are not (2014) (0)
Early adversity and the development of explore–exploit tradeoffs (2023) (0)
D. Shaffer & J. Dunn (eds), The first year of life: psychological and medical implications of early experience . New York: Wiley, 1979. Pp. xii + 221. (1981) (0)
Running head: CAUSAL FRAMING IMPROVES EARLY ANALOGICAL REASONING 1 (2019) (0)
Michael Arbib , In Search of the Person: Philosophical Explorations in Cognitive Science . Reviewed by (1986) (0)
Ask me why, don't tell me why: Asking children for explanations facilitates relational thinking. (2022) (0)
Culture, causal attributions, and development: A comparison of Chinese and U.S. 4-and 6-year-olds (2015) (0)
When and how do toddlers in rural Western Kenya understand the referential nature of pictures? (2020) (0)
Proceedings for the Annual Meeting of the Cognitice Science Society 2015 (2015) (0)
Cross-domain variation in children's causal reasoning (2011) (0)
Marshall M. Weinberg Conference: The Future of Cognitive Science - Thursday afternoon (Oct. 16, 2008) session: John R. Anderson and Alison Gopnik (2008) (0)
EXPLORING EXPLORATION: COMPARING CHILDREN (2020) (0)
Considering Counterfactuals (2013) (0)
K. Nelson (ed.), Children's language , Vol. 3. Hilisdale, N.J.: Eribaum, 1982. Pp. xvi + 505. (1985) (0)
Children's Theories: Understanding the Representational Mind . Josef Perner. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1991. xiv, 348 pp., illus. $35. A Bradford Book. Learning, Development, and Conceptual Change. (1991) (0)
Computational ethics Trends in Cognitive Sciences (2022) (0)
The work of the imagination (book review) (2001) (0)
24-Month-Olds Engage in Relational Causal Reasoning (2013) (0)
Proceedings of the 35th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2013, Berlin, Germany, July 31 - August 3, 2013 (2013) (0)
The Psychopsychology of the Fringe (1993) (0)
Can a perceptual task be used to infer conceptual representations?: A reply to Glorioso, Kuznar, Pavlic, & Povinelli (2020) (0)
Sticking to the evidence? A behavioral and computational case study of micro-theory change in the domain of magnetism. (2019) (0)
What if? Counterfactual reasoning, pretense, and the role of possible worlds (2013) (0)
Toddlers and preschoolers use relational concepts to solve problems (2020) (0)
Small Wonders: A Review of Gardner’s The Disciplined Mind (2000) (0)
The Meaning of Make-Believe (2001) (0)
Running Head: PROBABILITIES AND INTERVENTIONS (2009) (0)
Desires influence 4- to 6-year-old children's probabilistic judgments (2017) (0)
Learning from others through and statistics (2014) (0)
child as a rational model of preference understanding in children. (2014) (0)
The future of human behaviour research (2022) (0)
Bounding Culture P AULO S OUSA ¤ (2002) (0)
(Eds.). Life history and learning: How childhood, caregiving and old age shape cognition and culture in humans and other animals [spec. iss.] (2020) (0)
Halte au surinvestissement parental (2017) (0)
4- and 5-Year-Olds' Comprehension of Functional Metaphors (2020) (0)

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