Bobby Sparks

Bobby is a PhD student working with Dr. Ashley Thomas. He is broadly interested in how children learn from varied environments. For example, he is interested in how children acquire representations of structure in their environment and how children adaptively deploy these representations to guide reasoning, learning, and behavior. In the Thomas Lab, he is interested in understanding how infants and children develop concepts of particular and general people and how this development shapes both their thinking about minds and their early learning. To address these questions, Bobby aims to take an interdisciplinary approach combining behavioral and computational methods from cognitive and developmental science.