Department of Psychology

Research Interests

Thanks to Piaget's pioneering work, the study of cognitive development has become a thriving field of scientific inquiry. But what exactly is cognitive development? We roughly know what it means to talk about organs developing. But what do we mean when we talk about concepts or cognition developing? Are all concepts innate, potentially available from the beginning of life? Or do they really develop, undergoing changes as dramatic as the transitions from the first few cells that make up a zygote to sophisticated, differentiated organs like eyes, lungs, and hands? If they develop, what do they develop out of, and what makes them change? These are the fundamental questions I struggle with.

Currently, I am asking these questions in the context of studies of the acquisition of knowledge of numbers in childhood. Research on infants has revealed that we have surprisingly sophisticated arithmetic abilities in the first year of life. I am studying what aspects of common knowledge of numbers (e.g. that a list of symbols can be used to represent numbers, that numbers are ordered, that there are infinitely many numbers) are already present in our infant arithmetic abilities, and what aspects require real "cognitive development"; i.e. the creation of new mental structures. I am also interested in studying the role of our capacity to create and manipulate complex arbitrary symbols (e.g. five million million millions) in the development of mathematical systems that are significantly more powerful than our infant arithmetic abilities.  

Publications

• Le Corre, M. (2008). Why cardinalities are the “natural” natural numbers. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 31, 659.
• Le Corre, M. & Carey, S. (2008). Why the verbal counting principles are constructed out of representations of small sets of individuals: A reply to Gallistel. Cognition, 107(2), 650-662.
• Le Corre, M. & Carey, S. (2007). One, two, three, four, nothing more: An investigation of the conceptual sources of the verbal counting principles. Cognition, 105, 395-438.
• Le Corre, M., Van de Walle, G., Brannon, E.M., and Carey, S. (2006). Re-visiting the competence/performance debate in the acquisition of counting as a representation of the positive integers.Cognitive Psychology, 52(2), 130-169.