Renée Baillargeon

Renée Baillargeon (; born 1954) is a Canadian American research psychologist. A distinguished professor of Psychology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Baillargeon specializes in the development of cognition in infancy. Educated at McGill University and the University of Pennsylvania, Baillargeon is the recipient of the American Psychological Association's Boyd R. McCandless Young Scientist Award.

Life and career Born in Quebec, Canada, Baillargeon is the third child of French-Canadian parents. She is best known for her research showing that infants have an intuitive awareness of physical laws such as solidity, containment, and occlusion at a young age. However, her research interests encompass a variety of issues in causal reasoning, focusing not only on the physical but also the psychological, sociomoral, and biological domains. Baillargeon received a B.A. in Psychology from McGill University in 1975 and a Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1981 under the supervision of Rochel Gelman and Elizabeth Spelke. Subsequently, from 1981 to 1982, Baillargeon completed a postdoctoral fellowship at MIT under the supervision of Susan Carey. She received her first academic appointment at the University of Texas at Austin in 1982, a year later she moved to the University of Illinois where she has remained since.

Research

Causal reasoning domains Baillargeon spends much of her career researching infant development through the lens of domains. Domains are unique frameworks that allow infants to reason and learn about events. Baillargeon identifies four causal reasoning domains entitled physical reasoning, psychological reasoning, sociomoral reasoning, and biological reasoning. Baillargeon argues that Piaget's finding regarding infants' failure to understand object permanence until 8–12 months old was rooted in a lack of motor ability as opposed to inadequate cognitive development. In an effort to account for infants' lack of motor skills, Baillargeon's studies of object permanence measure infants' fixation times on (i.e., how long they spend looking at) impossible versus possible events. Through the use of an eye tracker, Baillargeon and DeVos concluded that the longer length of time spent looking at the taller carrot showed that 3.5-month-old infants knew the existence, height, and direction of the carrot, and they had an expectation to see the tall carrot appear over the short screen.

Baillargeon expresses contrasting ideas to those of her mentor Elizabeth Spelke. Although both Baillargeon and Spelke believe that children are born with some understanding of the world, Baillargeon claims that this understanding comes in the form of innate learning mechanisms while Spelke argues that infants are born with substantive knowledge regarding objects. Baillargeon claims that infants learn to reason about novel physical phenomena by forming an all or nothing concept, adding discrete and continuous variables that seem to affect the event, and lastly they reason qualitatively and quantitatively. 2007: Elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. 2015: Elected to the National Academy of Sciences.