| 1 | Name: | Dr. Susan E. Carey | |
| Institution: | Harvard University | ||
| Year Elected: | 2007 | ||
| Class: | 3. Social Sciences | ||
| Subdivision: | 305 | ||
| Residency: | Resident | ||
| Living? : | Living | ||
| Birth Date: | 1942 | ||
Susan Carey is Henry A. Morss, Jr. and Elizabeth W. Morss Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. Her research illuminates the development and nature of human knowledge and charts the intuitive theories that organize children's and adults' concepts of numbers, living things and the material world. Concepts are the basic units of thought. Dr. Carey has shown how children's concepts gain meaning and functional use from theories they construct about the world, starting from a few innate notions. She initiated modern experimental studies of children's understanding of numbers and counting, of physical causation, and of biology with its associated concepts of person, animal, and living thing, arguing for parallels between infants' developing concepts of number and causality and similar changes over mankind's intellectual history. She has also made seminal contributions to areas such as language acquisition, cognitive neuroscience, comparative primate cognition, and science education. Her research sheds light on children's thought and language and shows how educators can enhance the teaching of science and mathematics. Dr. Carey has been a Fulbright Fellow and William James Fellow and has been elected a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences (2001) and the National Academy of Sciences (2002). | |||