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Psychology

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Amanda Brandone, Associate Professor of Psychology at Lehigh Uniiversity

Amanda Brandone

Associate Professor

Director of Undergraduate Studies

6107585638
acb210@lehigh.edu
Chandler-Ullmann Room 106
Education:

Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, Psychology

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Additional Interests

  • Conceptual Development
  • Development of Social Cognition

Research Statement

How do infants and young children think about the complex world of people, objects, animals, and events? Do they understand the world solely through what is available on the surface—what is observable, concrete, and obvious? Or do they look beyond the surface to reason about deeper, hidden constructs? My research explores how young children move beyond what is perceptually available and reason about the non-obvious. I address this central theme through two distinct, but related lines of work: (1) how do infants and children understand the social world, and (2) how do they organize their knowledge about the world into categories.

My first line of research examines infants’ reasoning about the non-obvious properties of people. Our commonsense understanding that human behavior is motivated by non-obvious internal causes, such as desires, intentions, thoughts, and beliefs—known as theory of mind—serves as the foundation for our ability to navigate the social world. In recent years, exciting research on the origins and precursors of theory of mind has revealed that already within the first year of life, infants possess considerable knowledge about others’ minds. Building off of these findings, my work has examined when and how infants develop an understanding of human behavior as intentional (i.e., motivated by subjective, internal causes), how the rich information provided in infants’ social and motor experience contributes to their developing understanding of intentional actions, and how early social-cognitive knowledge and abilities feed into the process of conceptual development that results in more mature social reasoning and behavior.

My second line of research examines children’s reasoning about abstract kinds. Kinds are categories of objects (stoves), people (strangers), animals (birds), etc. that share many similarities including non-obvious ones that go beyond perceptual features and statistical regularity (e.g., function, traits, internal parts). Kinds are conceptual abstractions that are not directly observable. Thus, studying how children learn and reason about kinds offers insight into how they learn and reason about the non-obvious. To investigate children’s thinking about kinds, I have explored their use and comprehension of generic noun phrases. Generics (e.g., Stoves are hot; Don’t talk to strangers; Birds lay eggs) refer directly to kinds (e.g., the abstract category of stoves, strangers, or birds) and express broad generalizations about shared properties of category members. Generics appear frequently in natural speech and provide an important means of conveying information about categories. In my work, I examine how children interpret generics and what this can tell us about their reasoning about abstract categories.

Biography

Amanda Brandone is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology. She joined the Lehigh faculty in 2010 after receiving her PhD in Developmental Psychology from the University of Michigan. Dr. Brandone's research examines the development of conceptual knowledge during infancy and early childhood – including what initial knowledge about the world is present in infancy and early childhood, the mechanisms by which knowledge changes across development, and how early conceptual knowledge lays the groundwork for mature human cognition.

Brandone, A. C. & *Stout, W. (2023). Mentalistic and normative frameworks in children’s explanations of others’ behaviors. Child Development. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.14027

Brandone, A. C., & *Stout, W. (2023). The origins of theory of mind in infant social cognition: Investigating longitudinal pathways from infant intention understanding and joint attention to preschool theory of mind. Journal of Cognition and Development, 24(3), 375-396. https://doi.org/10.1080/15248372.2022.2146117

Osterhaus, C., Brandone, A. C., Vosniadou, S., Nicolopoulou, A. (2021). Editorial: The emergence and development of scientific thinking during the early years: Basic processes and supportive contexts. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 629384. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.629384

*Stout, W., *Karahuta, E., Laible, D., & Brandone, A. C. (2021). A longitudinal study of the differential social-cognitive foundations of early prosocial behaviors. Infancy, 26(2), 271-290. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/infa.12381

Brandone, A. C., *Stout, W., & *Moty, K. (2020). Intentional action processing across the transition to crawling: Does the experience of self-locomotion infants’ understanding of intentional actions? Infant Behavior and Development, 60, 101470. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infbeh.2020.101470

Brandone, A. C., *Stout, W., & *Moty, K. (2019). Triadic interactions support infants’ emerging understanding of intentional actions. Developmental Science, 23, 12880. https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.12880

Brandone, A. C., & *Klimek, B. (2018). The developing theory of mental state control: Changes in beliefs about the controllability of emotion from elementary school through adulthood. Journal of Cognition and Development, 19(5), 509-531. https://doi.org/10.1080/15248372.2018.1520711

Brandone, A. C. (2017). Changes in beliefs about category homogeneity and variability across childhood. Child Development, 88(3), 846-866. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cdev.12616/

Brandone, A. C. (2015). Infants’ social and motor experience and the emerging understanding of intention. Developmental Psychology, 51(4), 512-523. https://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0038844

Brandone, A. C. (2015). Theory of mind and behavior. In R. Scott & S. Kosslyn (Eds.), Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons.

Brandone, A. C., Gelman, S. A., & *Hedglen, J. (2015). Young children’s intuitions about the truth conditions and implications of novel generics and quantified statements. Cognitive Science, 39(4), 711-738. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12176

Rhodes, M. & Brandone, A. C. (2014). Three-year-olds’ theories of mind in actions and words. Frontiers in Developmental Psychology, 5, 263. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00263

Brandone, A. C., Horwitz, S., Wellman, H. M., Aslin, R.N. (2014). Infants’ goal anticipations during failed and successful reaching actions. Developmental Science, 17(1), 23-34. https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.12095

Brandone, A. C., & Gelman, S. A. (2013). Generic language use reveals domain differences in young children’s expectations about animal and artifact categories. Cognitive Development, 28(1), 63-75. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cogdev.2012.09.002

Brandone, A. C., Cimpian, A., Leslie, S. J., & Gelman, S. A. (2012). Do lions have manes? For children, generics are about kinds rather than quantities. Child Development, 83(2), 423-433. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2011.01708.x

Cimpian, A., Brandone, A. C., & Gelman, S. A. (2010). Generic statements require little evidence for acceptance but have powerful implications. Cognitive Science, 34(8), 1452-1482. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1551-6709.2010.01126.x

Cimpian, A., Gelman, S. A., & Brandone, A. C. (2010). Theory-based considerations influence the interpretation of generic sentences. Language and Cognitive Processes, 25(2), 261-276. https://doi.org/10.1080/01690960903025227

Gelman, S. A., & Brandone, A. C. (2010). Fast-mapping placeholders: Using words to talk about kinds. Language Learning & Development, 6(3), 223-240. https://doi.org/10.1080/15475441.2010.484413

Brandone, A. C., & Gelman, S. A. (2009). Differences in preschoolers’ and adults’ use of generics about animals and artifacts: A window onto a conceptual divide. Cognition, 110(1), 1-22. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2008.08.005

Brandone, A. C., & Wellman, H. M. (2009). You can’t always get what you want: Infants understand failed goal-directed actions. Psychological Science, 20(1), 85-91. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02246.x

Chan, C., Brandone, A. C., & Tardif, T. (2009). Culture, context, or behavioral control? English and Mandarin-speaking mothers’ use of nouns and verbs in joint picturebook reading. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 40(4), 543-566. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022022109335184

Wellman, H. M., & Brandone, A. C. (2009). Early intention understandings that are common to primates predict children’s later theory of mind. Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 19(1), 57-62. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.conb.2009.02.004

Brandone, A. C., Golinkoff, R. M., & Hirsh-Pasek, K. (2008). Feasibility of computer-administered language assessment. Perspectives on School-Based Issues, 9(2), 57-65. https://doi.org/10.1044/sbi9.2.57

Maguire, M. J., Hirsh-Pasek, K., Golinkoff, R. M., & Brandone, A. (2008). Focusing on the relation: Fewer exemplars facilitate children’s initial verb learning and extension. Developmental Science, 11(4), 628-634. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-7687.2008.00707.x

Brandone, A., Golinkoff, R. M., Pulverman, R., Maguire, M.J., Hirsh-Pasek, K., & Pruden, S. M. (2007). Speaking for the wordless: Methods of studying cognitive linguistics in preverbal infants. In M. Gonzalez-Marquez, I. Mittelberg, S. Coulson, & M. Spivey (Eds.), Methods in cognitive linguistics (pp. 345-366). Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Brandone, A., Pence, K., Golinkoff, R.M., & Hirsh-Pasek, K. (2007). Action speaks louder than words: Young children differentially weight perceptual, social, and linguistic cues to learn verbs. Child Development, 78(4), 1322-1342. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8624.2007.01068.x

Brandone, A., Golinkoff, R. M., & Salkind, S. J. (2006). Language development. In G. Bear & K. Minke (Eds.), Children’s needs III: Understanding and addressing the developmental needs of children (pp. 499-514). Bethesda, MD: National Association of School Psychologists.

Teaching

PSYC 107 Child Development
PSYC 203 Research Methods & Data Analysis III
PSYC 346 Child Development and Social Policy
PSYC 351 Children’s Thinking