How do language and culture influence the development of abstract reasoning?

Dr Alexandra Carstensen is a postdoctoral researcher in the Meaning, Culture, and Cognition Lab at Radboud University in Nijmegen, The Netherlands. She completed her PhD in psychology at UC Berkeley, studying universals and variation in spatial language and cognition. Her current research focuses on the nature of category systems across languages: how these semantic structures vary, evolve, and influence thought.

Project description

The capacity to reason about relations is often cited as a defining feature of human cognition. Many children struggle with relational reasoning into middle childhood, but in some countries (e.g., China) children succeed earlier. This project seeks to understand these cross-language and cross-cultural differences. We ask whether, and how, relational language and varying cultural attitudes toward relations support reasoning.

The remaining three Supervisors will be announced shortly.
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