Karen Wynn
American/Canadian psychologist
Karen Wynn is a Canadian and American artist and Yale University Professor Emerita of psychology and cognitive science. She was born in Austin, Texas, and grew up on the Canadian prairies in Regina, Saskatchewan. Her research explores the cognitive capacities of infants and young children. She directed for over 3 decades the Infant Cognition Laboratory, first in the Psychology Department at the University of Arizona, and then in the Psychology Department at Yale University.
Education
Wynn received her Bachelor of Arts in psychology from McGill University, and her PhD in cognitive science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her first faculty position was at the University of Arizona. She joined the Yale University Psychology Department in 1999.
Research
Numerical cognition
Karen Wynn is known for her pioneering work on infants' and children's early numerical cognition. The first of her many influential research studies on this topic, published in the scientific journal Nature in 1992, reported that five-month-old human infants are able to compute the outcomes of simple addition and subtraction operations on small sets of physical objects.
Methods
Thirty-two five-month-old infants participated in the first experiment reported in the Nature article.
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This entry incorporates text from “Karen Wynn” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.