CogSci Colloquium: Kristin Lagattuta (UC Davis)

Kristin Lagattuta (Psychology, UC Davis).

Title: Developing a Life History Theory of Mind: Awareness that the Mind Learns from the Past to Imagine the Future

Abstract: I will provide an overview of my research on 4- to 10-year-olds’ and adults’ beliefs about whether and how people generalize from their past social interactions when engaging in episodic future thinking; that is, their awareness that people’s minds draw from prior experiences when imagining what will happen next. Across multiple studies, results reveal significant age-related increases in expecting people’s future-oriented thoughts, emotions, and decisions to be biased by preceding life events, with 8- to 10-year-olds and adults presuming broader future generalizations compared to younger children. I will further discuss sources of individual differences, including using eye tracking to examine variability in how children and adults weight different types of past event information when forecasting mental states.