In this insightful session, Professor Susan Hespos from MARCS BabyLab will explore how everyday interactions with young children are crucial for enhancing their development and laying a strong foundation for the future. Whether you’re an educator, caregiver, or early childhood professional, this webinar will provide valuable insights into the power of play and interaction in the early years.
About Professor Susan Hespos
Developmental psychologist Professor Hespos is on a mission to show that babies think before they speak. She runs BabyLab, the foremost infant research laboratory in Australia that conducts research with infants and children focusing on language acquisition, cognitive development and learning. Historically, it was thought that infants are born with a relatively blank slate and knowledge is constructed through interactions between the infant and the environment. In this approach, the task for the young infant is to construct reality by gaining experience. But Professor Hespos champions a different position in her work, called core knowledge. The key tenet of this approach is that underneath all the things that vary across humans, there exists a set of perceptual and conceptual capacities that are common.
About MARCS BabyLab
MARCS BabyLab is a non-profit Western Sydney University research centre for pure and applied research focusing on language acquisition, cognitive development and learning.
BabyLab team up with little humans to try and answer big questions about what goes on inside the mind of babies and young children. Researchers design simple but intentional experiments on speech perception, conceptual change, and guided play. These studies allow us to learn more about the way humans acquire language and think about the world.
