Agnes Melinda Kovacs is a psychologist, linguist and cognitive scientist based at the Central European University. [1]
Kovacs received an MSc in psychology from Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, in 2002, then studied for a PhD at the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) in Trieste, Italy, which she received in 2008. [2] Her doctoral studies focused on bilingualism and theory of mind. [3]
From 2008 to 2010 she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Psychology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, supported by a Marie Curie research fellowship. In 2010 she moved to the Central European University to continue her postdoctoral research at the Cognitive Development Center there. [1] [2]
In 2012 Kovacs was the recipient of a European Research Council Starting Grant for her project REPCOLLAB (Representational preconditions for understanding other minds in the service of human collaboration and social learning), which she carried out at the Central European University (CEU). [2] [3] She was promoted to Research Fellow in 2015 and took up a position as associate professor in 2017. [1] She is currently director of the Cognitive Development Center at CEU. [4]
In 2019 Kovacs was elected ordinary member of the Academia Europaea. [1]
Kovacs's team combines methods from cognitive neuroscience with ideas from philosophy of mind. Their focus is on understanding the minds of others, and they conduct neuroimaging and behavioural experiments on infants and adults. [3] In her early work, conducted with Jacques Mehler among others, she investigated the effects of bilingualism on executive functions and on false-belief reasoning. [5]
In psychology, theory of mind refers to the capacity to understand other people by ascribing mental states to them. A theory of mind includes the knowledge that others' beliefs, desires, intentions, emotions, and thoughts may be different from one's own. Possessing a functional theory of mind is crucial for success in everyday human social interactions. People utilize a theory of mind when analyzing, judging, and inferring others' behaviors. The discovery and development of theory of mind primarily came from studies done with animals and infants. Factors including drug and alcohol consumption, language development, cognitive delays, age, and culture can affect a person's capacity to display theory of mind. Having a theory of mind is similar to but not identical with having the capacity for empathy or sympathy.
Cognitive development is a field of study in neuroscience and psychology focusing on a child's development in terms of information processing, conceptual resources, perceptual skill, language learning, and other aspects of the developed adult brain and cognitive psychology. Qualitative differences between how a child processes their waking experience and how an adult processes their waking experience are acknowledged. Cognitive development is defined as the emergence of the ability to consciously cognize, understand, and articulate their understanding in adult terms. Cognitive development is how a person perceives, thinks, and gains understanding of their world through the relations of genetic and learning factors. There are four stages to cognitive information development. They are, reasoning, intelligence, language, and memory. These stages start when the baby is about 18 months old, they play with toys, listen to their parents speak, they watch TV, anything that catches their attention helps build their cognitive development.
Jacques Mehler was a cognitive psychologist specializing in language acquisition.
The Academia Europaea is a pan-European Academy of Humanities, Letters, Law, and Sciences. The Academia was founded in 1988 as a functioning Europe-wide Academy that encompasses all fields of scholarly inquiry. It acts as co-ordinator of European interests in national research agencies.
Gestures in language acquisition are a form of non-verbal communication involving movements of the hands, arms, and/or other parts of the body. Children can use gesture to communicate before they have the ability to use spoken words and phrases. In this way gestures can prepare children to learn a spoken language, creating a bridge from pre-verbal communication to speech. The onset of gesture has also been shown to predict and facilitate children's spoken language acquisition. Once children begin to use spoken words their gestures can be used in conjunction with these words to form phrases and eventually to express thoughts and complement vocalized ideas.
Michael Siegal, PhD, DSc was a developmental psychologist and cognitive scientist who was Marie Curie Chair in Psychology at the University of Trieste, Italy, and also a Professor of Psychology at the University of Sheffield, UK.
Patricia Katherine Kuhl is a Professor of Speech and Hearing Sciences and co-director of the Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences at the University of Washington. She specializes in language acquisition and the neural bases of language, and she has also conducted research on language development in autism and computer speech recognition. Kuhl currently serves as an associate editor for the journals Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Neuroscience, and Developmental Science.
Renée Baillargeon is a Canadian American research psychologist. A distinguished professor of Psychology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Baillargeon specializes in the development of cognition in infancy. Educated at McGill University and the University of Pennsylvania, Baillargeon is the recipient of the American Psychological Association's Boyd R. McCandless Young Scientist Award.
Maria Rosa Antognazza was an Italian-British philosopher, who was professor of philosophy at King's College London.
In psychology, agency signifies the concept of a person's ability to initiate and control their actions, and the feeling they have of being in charge of their actions. The topic of agency can be divided into two topical domains. The first half of the topic of agency deals with the behavioral sense, or outward expressive evidence thereof. In behavioral psychology, agents are goal-directed entities that are able to monitor their environment to select and perform efficient means-ends actions that are available in a given situation to achieve an intended goal. Behavioral agency, therefore, implies the ability to perceive and to change the environment of the agent. Crucially, it also entails intentionality to represent the goal-state in the future, equifinal variability to be able to achieve the intended goal-state with different actions in different contexts, and rationality of actions in relation to their goal to produce the most efficient action available. Cognitive scientists and Behavioral psychologists have thoroughly investigated agency attribution in humans and non-human animals, since social cognitive mechanisms such as communication, social learning, imitation, or theory of mind presuppose the ability to identify agents and differentiate them from inanimate, non-agentive objects. This ability has also been assumed to have a major effect on inferential and predictive processes of the observers of agents, because agentive entities are expected to perform autonomous behavior based on their current and previous knowledge and intentions. On the other hand, inanimate objects are supposed to react to external physical forces.
Núria Sebastián Gallés is a cognitive scientist known for her work on bilingual language development and the impact of bilingualism on cognition. She is Professor of Psychology at Pompeu Fabra University where she heads the Speech Acquisition and Perception (SAP) Research Group. In 2012, Sebastián Gallés received the Narcis Monturiol Medal as recognition of her scientific contributions. She was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 2016.
Roshan Cools is a Professor of Cognitive Neuropsychiatry at Radboud University Nijmegen. She is interested in the motivational and cognitive control of human behaviour and how it is impacted by neuromodulation. She was elected to the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2018.
Fei Xu is an American developmental psychologist and cognitive scientist who is currently a professor of psychology and the director of the Berkeley Early Learning Lab at UC Berkeley. Her research focuses on cognitive and language development, from infancy to middle childhood.
Malinda Carpenter,Ph.D, FRSE is a professor of developmental psychology at the University of St Andrews, an international researcher specialising in infant and child communications, prosocial behaviour and group reactions, in how people learn to understand others, and building self esteem; her work includes research between ape and human social cognition, and more recently in considering human-robotic communication futures.
Soonja Choi (Korean: 최순자) is a South Korean linguist. She specializes in language acquisition, semantics, and the linguistics of Korean.
Ghislaine Dehaene-Lambertz is a French paediatrician. She is the Professor and Director of the Developmental Neuroimaging Lab at CNRS. Her research uses non-invasive brain imaging to understand children's cognitive function. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2022.
Judit Gervain is a psychologist, neurolinguist and acquisitionist who is professor of developmental psychology at the University of Padua.
Katalin (Kati) Farkas is a Hungarian philosopher. The former president of the European Society for Analytic Philosophy, she works in Austria as the head of the philosophy department at the Central European University in Vienna. Her research involves epistemology and the philosophy of mind.
Iraide Ibarretxe-Antuñano is a professor of linguistics at the University of Zaragoza known for her research in cognitive linguistics and psycholinguistics.
Dagmar Divjak is a linguist who is professor at the University of Birmingham, specializing in corpus linguistics and cognitive linguistics.