Dr. Waismeyer is a postdoctoral fellow working with Dr. Andrew Meltzoff. Before coming to the Institute, she earned a Ph.D. in comparative and developmental psychology at the University of California at Berkeley with Dr. Lucia Jacobs and Dr. Alison Gopnik. Dr. Waismeyer's research interests focus on how toddlers and young children make inferences about objects and events. Her research explores the development of children's inferential learning strategies both in spatial and in causal tasks and how children's developing social understanding may play a role as an aid to learning within non-pedagogical situations. In her current work, she is examining toddlers' abilities to learn about causal relationships from observation of both deterministic and probabilistic covariations.
Publications:
Waismeyer, A.S. & Jacobs, L.F. (in press) The emergence of flexible spatial strategies in young children. Developmental Psychology
Meltzoff, A., Waismeyer, A.S., Gopnik, A. (in press) Learning about causes from people: Observational Causal Learning in 24-month old infants. Developmental Psychology
Waisman, A.S., Lucas, C.G., Griffiths, T. & Jacobs, L.F. (2011) A Bayesian model of navigation in squirrels. Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
Waisman, A. S., & Jacobs, L. F. (2008). Flexibility of cue use in the fox squirrel (Sciurus niger). Animal Cognition, 11(4), 625-636.
