Susan Carey

Carey was born in 1942 to William and Mary Carey. She received her BA from Radcliffe College in 1964, a Fulbright scholarship to study in University of London in 1965, and her PhD in experimental psychology from Harvard University in 1971.

She was employed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1972 to 1996 in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. She was an assistant professor from 1972 to 1977, an associate professor from 1977 to 1984, and a full professor from 1984 to 1996. She was a professor at New York University in the department of psychology from 1996 to 2001. In 2001 she joined the faculty at Harvard University.

Susan Carey and Elsa Bartlett coined the term "fast mapping" in 1978.[3][2] This term refers to the hypothesized mental process where a new concept is learned based only on a single exposure. In 1985 Carey wrote "Conceptual Change in Childhood", a book about the cognitive differences between children and adults. It is a case study about children's acquisition of biological knowledge and analyzes the ways the knowledge is restructured during development. The book reconciles Jean Piaget's work on animism with later work on children's knowledge of biological concepts.

On returning to Harvard, Carey began working alongside Elizabeth Spelke, and they started the Laboratory for Developmental Studies. Carey also worked alongside George Miller, Jerome Butler, and Roger Brown. She conducted experiments on infants, toddlers, adults, and non-human primates. Carey coined the term "Quinian bootstrapping", a theory that people build complex concepts out of simple ones.[7]

In 2009 Carey wrote The Origin of Concepts, which shows the basis of development of cognitive science.[6] The book won the 2010 Eleanor Maccoby Book Award of the American Psychological Association.

Carey has served on editorial boards for the Psychological Review, Psychological Science, Journal of Acquisition, and Development Psychology.

Carey is married to the professor of philosophy Ned Block (NYU).

Carey received the Jean Nicod Prize for philosophy of mind in 1998. In 2009 she was the first woman to receive the David E. Rumelhart Prize for significant contributions to the theoretical foundation of human cognition.

Carey is a member of the American Philosophical Society,[8] National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the United States National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Educational Sciences of Ukraine, and the British Academy.

She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001.[1] She is a Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities.

Susan Carey has received the following fellowships: Radcliffe Institute Fellowship (1976-1978), Sloan Fellow (1980-1981), Institute for Advanced Studies fellow in the Behavioral Sciences (1984-1985), Cattell Fellowship (1995-1996), George A Miller Lecturer for the Society of Cognitive Neuroscience,(1998), Guggenheim Fellowship (1999-2000), National Academy of Education (1999), Society for Experimental Psychology (1999), American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2001), William James Fellow Award, American Psychology Society (2002); The British Academy Corresponding Fellow (2007), Ottawa Township High School Hall of Fame (2009), Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award, American Psychological Association (2009), and Cognitive Development Society Book Award (2001)[9]

• Carey, Susan (1985). Conceptual change in childhood. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. ISBN 0262031108.
• Carey, Susan (2009). The origin of concepts. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780195367638.

Papers written as sole author

• 2015 The science of cognitive science
• 2014 On Learning New Primitives in the Language of Thought: Reply to Rey
• 2011 Concept Innateness, Concept Continuity, and Bootstrapping: A Response to Commentaries on The Origin of Concepts
• 2011 The Origin of Concepts
• 2010 Beyond Fast Mapping
• 2009 Where our number concepts come from
• 2009 Math schemata and the origins of number representations
• 2004 Bootstrapping and the origins of concepts
• 2002 Evidence for numerical abilities in young infants: A fatal flaw?
• 2001 Evolutionary and Ontogenetic Foundations of Arithmetic
• 2000 Science education as conceptual change
• 2000 The origin of concepts
• 1998 Knowledge of number: Its evolution and ontogenesis
• 1997 Do constraints on word meaning reflect prelinguistic cognitive architecture?
• 1994 Does learning a language require conceptual change?
• 1992 Becoming a face expert
• 1988 Conceptual differences between children and adults
• 1986 Cognitive science and science education [9]

• Harvard Laboratory for Developmental Studies page
• Harvard Department of Psychology page