Elizabeth Bonawitz

Elizabeth Bonawitz is a developmental psychologist and computational cognitive scientist. Her empirical research focuses on the core constructs of learning, children’s early causal beliefs, children’s curiosity, and how children develop perceptions of the world. The Economist, Psychology Today, and Scientific American.

Bonawitz is Professor of Education the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Biography In 2002, Bonawitz received her B.S. degree in cognitive psychology at Northeastern University. After obtaining her bachelor's degree, she obtained her Ph.D. in brain and cognitive sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the year 2009. In 2002, Bonawitz worked as a lab coordinator at MIT, where she worked with Schulz and Josh Tenenbaum

In 2009, Bonawitz completed her Ph.D. under the supervision of Dr. Laura Schulz. Her Ph.D. dissertation used the Bayesian models to explain how children make rational predictions, explorations, and explanations. She argues that children are scientists and rational learners, who make predictions based on past experiences and information they learn.

As an MIT graduate student, Bonawitz received the Angus Macdonald Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching in 2006 and the Walle Nauta Award for Continuing Dedication to Teaching at MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. In 2006, she also received The Marr Prize, which is sponsored by The Cognitive Science Society. In 2018, she received a six year grant from James S. McDonnell Foundation, worth $600,000, to do research on computational modelling on children's causal learning.

Bonawitz’s non scholarly interests include writing music, playing tennis, and skying. She used to sing for Dead Tongues, which is the un-official band of the Stanford Linguistics Department. Bonawitz has a YouTube channel, and she has a video of her singing "Empirical Girl," a satire take of Madonna's "Material Girl".

Research Bonawitz's research focuses on the core constructs of learning, children’s early causal beliefs, children’s curiosity, and how children develop perceptions of the world. She does experiments in the lab to study how children learn from observations, teachers, and their own exploration and play. She uses computational modelling to explain how learning occurs in these different contexts.

Bonawitz's second most cited study on google scholar explores how children's exploratory play supports causal inferences. Bonawitz's hypothesizes that children's exploratory play would be affected by the quality of evidence they observe. The study found that when children are in unclear situations, they are more likely to experiment and explore.

Grants and fellowships Bonawitz's research program has been funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). One NSF-funded project “Developing an early understanding of contagion in preschool- and kindergarten-aged children” was a collaboration between Bonawitz, Nina Fefferman, and Vanessa LoBue. The purpose of this study was to assess the effectiveness of a storybook intervention on illness transmission for preschool and kindergarten children. aimed to examine how different teaching styles such as direct and guided query instructions affect elementary school children's learning and motivation in science. This is a longitudinal study which will span for 3.5 years and is estimated to finish in 2028. The purpose of this study is to investigate the impact of science interventions in elementary school.

Representative publications Bonawitz, E., Denison, S., Griffiths, T. L., & Gopnik, A. (2014). Probabilistic models, learning algorithms, and response variability: sampling in cognitive development. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 18(10), 497-500. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2014.06.006 Bonawitz, E. B., & Lombrozo, T. (2012). Occam's rattle: children's use of simplicity and probability to constrain inference. Developmental Psychology, 48(4), 1156-1164. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0026471 Bonawitz, E., Shafto, P., Gweon, H., Goodman, N. D., Spelke, E., & Schulz, L. (2011). The double-edged sword of pedagogy: Instruction limits spontaneous exploration and discovery. Cognition, 120(3), 322-330. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2010.10.001 Bonawitz, E., Ullman, T. D., Bridgers, S., Gopnik, A., & Tenenbaum, J. B. (2019). Sticking to the evidence? A behavioral and computational case study of micro‐theory change in the domain of magnetism. Cognitive Science, 43(8), e12765. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12765 Bonawitz, E. B., van Schijndel, T. J., Friel, D., & Schulz, L. (2012). Children balance theories and evidence in exploration, explanation, and learning. Cognitive Psychology, 64(4), 215-234. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogpsych.2011.12.002 Wang, J., Yang, Y., Macias, C., & Bonawitz, E. (2021). Children with more uncertainty in their intuitive theories seek domain-relevant information. Psychological Science, 32(7), 1147-1156. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797621994230