Topic:	The Nature of Imagination
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Guest:	Alison Gopnik; Professor of Psychology, Institute of Cognitive Science; University of California, Berkeley
What is it?	A lot of our thinking, and even our perception, has to do not only with what is, but what might be, and what would have been. That is, the imagination is an important part of our intellectual life. And learning to use our imaginations without losing sight of reality is part of growing up. What is the imagination, and what led Mother Nature to make it such an important part of our make-up? John and Ken discuss the imagination with Alison Gopnik, a leading scholar in the field of children’s learning.

About the Guest

Professor Gopnik's research explores how young children come to know about the world around them. The work is informed by the “theory theory” -- the idea that children develop and change intuitive theories of the world in much the way that scientists do. Most recently, she has been concentrating on young children's causal knowledge and causal learning across domains, including physical, biological and psychological knowledge. In collaboration with computer scientists, she is using the Bayes Net formalism to help explain how children are able to learn causal structure from patterns of data, and has demonstrated that young children have much more powerful causal learning mechanisms than was previously supposed.

A complete list of her recent publications is listed here.