Denis Mareschal

Director CBCD, Professor of Psychology

Research Interests

I am interested in all aspects of perceptual and cognitive development in infancy and childhood.The real challenge for developmental psychology is to explain HOW one level of competence is transformed into the next level of competence. A mechanistic account of development is required to answer this question. Computer modelling provides a tool for exploring how different candidate mechanisms can account for the developmental profiles observed in infants and children. Connectionist networks are particularly well suited for modelling development because they develop their own internal representations in response to environmental pressures. Moreover, they provide a bridge between the neuroscience descriptions of development and the traditional (behavioural) descriptions of cognitive development.

My research involves a blend of (connectionist) computational modelling and empirical studies with infants and children. Research projects with children have included: the development of seriation abilities, the development of metaphor comprehension, and the developing basis for inductive reasoning. Research projects with infants have included: the search for occluded and visible objects, the perception of object unity, categorisation of visually presented stimuli, and the determinants of visual pursuit.

The common theme that underlies these projects is the exploration of how the computational properties of a learning systems (e. g., a connectionist autoencoder network or a 3-month-old infant) interact with the distribution of meaningful features in the environment to cause the observed patterns of development in children and infants.

Publications

Grant Funding

These and other projects are currently funded by: The Royal Society, The British Academy, ESRC (UK), EU Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Framework, The Sackler Institute (USA), ARC (Australia), NSERC (Canada), The Wellcome Trust, The Leverhulme Trust, and the Education Endowment Foundation. Professor Mareschal is the recipient of a Royal Society-Wolfson research merit award.