We are a group of psychologists conducting research in various fields of cognitive science, related to categorization and cognitive development.

One part of our group explores concept formation and category learning with different forms of generalization: prototypes, examples, theories and rules. We are interested in a comparison between early and late stages of categorization, the difficulties that people face at these stages and the means they use to resolve these difficulties. We study with relation to other cognitive processes — the organization of memory, control of attention, interaction between categorization and perception, solving different inductive tasks. We conduct most of this research with adult subjects.

Another part of our research group studies cognitive development in children from early infancy and toddlerhood. Our topics of interest are the social learning in different areas: instrumental actions (overimitation phenomenon), lexical learning (referential intention, role of joint attention, shape bias and conceptual basis for early word learning), emotional development (attachment and social referencing; emotional representation). Some of our studies are devoted to the category learning in children and the role of the verbalization in this process.

For most of our research with adults, we use laboratory experiments with computer presentation of study material. With children, we often create game situations in their natural environment.

If your interests are similar to our we invite you to discuss. More information you can find in sections Research and Publications.