30 POPULAR SCIENCE
ALISON GOPNIK’S CAREER BEGAN WITH
a psychology experiment she
now considers ridiculous. Aiming
to understand how 15-month-
olds connect words with abstract
concepts(daddy = caregiver), she decided to visit
nine kids once a week for a year. The then Oxford
graduate student would record everything they
said as part of her dissertation. “It was absurd
for a million reasons,” says Gopnik, holed up on
a winter Friday in her office at the University of
California at Berkeley, where she is a professor of
developmental psychology. “If a child had moved
away, if there weren’t any take-aways after the year,
or any number of things, all that work would have
been gone,” she says, before adding, “I would never
allow a student of mine to do anything like that today.”Building
aBaby-
Brained AI
Though her experiment didn’t solve
any language-acquisition mysteries, it did
overturn her assumptions about childhood
learning and intelligence—and it altered her
career path. Now her research has drawn the
interest of artiicial-intelligence scientists who
want to adapt her insights to their machine-
learning algorithms. What she learned about
kids’ smarts while a grad student still holds
sway—for her ield and possibly theirs. “Instead
of thinking about children as these kind of
starter adults, I realised they were profoundly
different,” says Gopnik, now 62, and with
her own grown children and grandchildren.
“The way they use words, the meaningsthey
express, the way they express them—none of it
matched how adults think or speak.”
Today, Gopnik oversees her own cognitive
development lab at UC Berkeley, and is the
author of several books on early childhood
learning and development. She’s a TED
alum, aWall Street Journalcolumnist, and
has attained that singular intellectualIN PROFILE ALISON GOPNIKA psychologist's work inspires autonomous car designers to think young.
by Bryan GardinerInsight