Susan E. Carey

Susan E. Carey

Professor (Emeritus)
Susan E. Carey

The human conceptual repertoire poses a formidable challenge to the cognitive sciences. Humans are the only species who can ponder orders of infinity, the causes and cure of global warming, or any of literally billions of propositions formulated over the the hundreds of thousands of concepts no other animal represents. Susan Carey’s research concerns the development of concepts in the child and adult (i.e., over ontogenesis), and the cultural construction of concepts over history. Her research is informed by insights from philosophical analyses of concepts, historical analyses of conceptual change in science, and experimental studies of human infants, young children and adults, and of non-human primates. Understanding conceptual development requires characterizing the initial representational repertoire, what changes with development, and the learning mechanisms that underlie these changes. Dr. Carey’s research specifies the conceptually rich building blocks of human cognition and documents conceptual discontinuities, episodes of change that increase representational power or involve the construction of conceptual systems incommensurable with those they supplant. With respect to the mechanisms that underlie conceptual change, Carey has concentrated on a bootstrapping process first sketched by historians and philosophers of science that she calls “Quinian bootstrapping.” Current case studies include representations of abstract relations and logical connectives, and conceptual changes within intuitive theories of biology and physical reasoning. Susan Carey received her BA from Radcliffe College and her PhD in Experimental Psychology from Harvard University, studying with George Miller, Jerome Bruner and Roger Brown. She taught at MIT (Psychology Department, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences) from 1973-1996, at NYU (Psychology Department) from 1996 - 2001 and has been at Harvard (Psychology Department) since 2001, where she cofounded the Laboratory for Developmental Studies with Elizabeth Spelke. She was awarded the 1998 Nicod Prize, was named the William James Fellow of APS in 2002, was awarded the David Rumerhart Prize in 2009, and APA Distinguished Scientific Achievement Award in in 2009, and an APA Mentor Award in 2013. She is a member of the Society for Experimental Psychology, the American Association of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the National Academy of Sciences, and is a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy

Contact Information

William James Hall 1170
33 Kirkland Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
p: 617 384 7918

Research Program

Role/Affiliation