Dr Amy Perfors

Biography/ Background

I grew up in an area of the United States that reminds me a lot of Australia -- New Mexico and Colorado, with their big blue skies and desert feel. As an undergraduate in California, I became interested in cognitive science and psychology. After a stint in Mozambique teaching biology and English, I went to Boston where I got my PhD, focusing on computational models of higher cognition (with a special interest in language). After completing the PhD I came straight to Adelaide, for which I have discovered a great affinity.

Although my job is technically as a senior lecturer, I am currently on a DECRA research fellowship. This allows me to spend more time focusing on my research interests. Between that and a Discovery Project (shared with Dan Navarro), my research comprises the bulk of my time. However, I do still love to teach, so I still give some lectures on language in the School of Psychology and also co-teach a class on Computational Cognitive Science in the Computer Science Department. For these and other contributions I was awarded the 2011 Executive Dean's Prize for Excellence in Teaching.

Qualifications

Ph.D., MIT, Brain & Cognitive Sciences

M.A., Stanford University, Linguistics

B.S., Stanford University, Symbolic Systems 

Research Interests

I’m interested many different questions in language acquisition and higher-order cognition. My interests in language acquisition centre on questions of learnability and domain specificity: what biases must children have in order to acquire knowledge in different domains? To what extent are these biases domain-general? What drives the difference in language acquisition abilities between adults and children? Why does language have the structure it does? My interests in other aspects of cognition focus on categorisation and concept learning, especially questions of representation and how people make sensible inductions given sparse or noisy data. Please see my lab website for more information.

Publications

Expertise for Media Contact

Categories	Psychology and psychiatry, Mathematics and statistics
Expertise	language acquisition; cognition; cognitive science; language evolution; language learning; Bayesian models of cognition; statistical and mathematical modeling of cognition

Entry last updated: Tuesday, 8 Jan 2013