Agnes Melinda Kovacs

Agnes Melinda Kovacs is a Hungarian psychologist, linguist and cognitive scientist based at the Central European University.

Education, career and honours Kovacs received an MSc in psychology from Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, in 2002, then studied for a PhD at the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) in Trieste, Italy, which she received in 2008. Her doctoral studies focused on bilingualism and theory of mind.

From 2008 to 2010 she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Psychology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, supported by a Marie Curie research fellowship. In 2010 she moved to the Central European University to continue her postdoctoral research at the Cognitive Development Center there.

In 2019 Kovacs was elected ordinary member of the Academia Europaea.

Selected publications Kovacs, Agnes Melinda. 2009. Early bilingualism enhances mechanisms of false-belief reasoning. Developmental science 12 (1), 48–54. Kovacs, Agnes Melinda, and Jacques Mehler. 2009. Cognitive gains in 7-month-old bilingual infants. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 106 (16), 6556–6560. Kovacs, Agnes Melinda, and Jacques Mehler. 2009. Flexible learning of multiple speech structures in bilingual infants. Science 325, 611–612. Kovacs, Agnes Melinda, Ernő Téglás, and Ansgar Denis Endress. 2010. The social sense: Susceptibility to others' beliefs in human infants and adults. Science 330, 1830–1834. Kovacs, Agnes Melinda, Tibor Tauzin, Ernő Téglás, György Gergely and Gergely Csibra. 2014. Pointing as epistemic request: 12-month-olds point to receive new information. Infancy 19 (6), 543–547.