Dr Amy Perfors
Room 508, Hughes Building |  |
Area of Research
Cognitive science and language acquisition
Senior Appointments and Memberships
Cognitive Science Society
Society for Research and Child Development
Child Development Society
Member of Brain and Cognition Centre
Awards
Walle Nauta Award for Continuing Dedication to Teaching (2007, 2006)
Angus MacDonald Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching (2005)
National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship (awarded 2004). Value: US $30,000 each year for three years (declined one)
National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship (awarded 2004). Value: US $30,000 each year for three years.
Psychology 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
Recent Key Publications
Perfors, A., Navarro, D. (2011) Language evolution is shaped by the structure of the world: An iterated learning analysis. Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.
Perfors, A. (2011) Memory limitations alone do not lead to over-regularization: An experimental and computational investigation. Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.
Perfors, A., Tenenbaum, J., Griffiths, T.L., Xu, F. (2011) A tutorial introduction to Bayesian models of cognitive development. Cognition.
Perfors, A., Tenenbaum, J.B., Regier, T. (2011) The learnability of abstract syntactic principles. Cognition 118(3): 306-338.
Navarro, D., Perfors, A. (2011) Hypothesis generation, the positive test strategy,and sparse categories. Psychological Review.
