Dr. Amanda Woodward is currently an Associate Professor for the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago. After receiving a B.A. from Swarthmore College, she went on to earn her Ph.D. in Psychology from Stanford University. Dr. Woodward has been with the University of Chicago since 1993. In 2000, Dr. Woodward received the Boyd McCandless Award for Early Career Contribution to Developmental Psychology from the American Psychological Association.

Dr. Woodward is a member of several professional associations including the American Psychological Association and the International Society for Infant Studies. She has also received a number of research grants including a $527,000 award from the National Institutes of Child Health and Human Development at the University of Chicago. Dr. Woodward has been active on many academic fronts. She is a teacher, an ad hoc reviewer, a member of editorial boards and committees, as well as the Sexual Harassment Complaint Advisor for the University of Chicago.

Despite her many academic activities, Dr. Woodward finds time to pursue her research interests in the area of child development. She is primarily interested in how infants develop cognitively with respect to understanding language as well as how and when they begin to understand human actions, such as goal related behaviors.

Contact Information:
Green 501
5848 S. University Avenue
Chicago, IL 60637
Fax: 773-702-0886
Email: woodward@uchicago.edu
Other Links: http://www.ccp.uchicago.edu/personalpages/personalpageindex.html

Research Interests
My research explores the earliest stages of cognitive development and language acquisition. I am particularly interested in infants' abilities to make sense of human action, and the ways in which this knowledge contributes to language acquisition.

Early reasoning about human action
By early childhood, we have distinct systems of knowledge to guide our reasoning about the motions of inanimate objects and the actions of people. In my research, I ask whether the seeds of these abilities are present in early infancy, and how this knowledge develops during the first year of life. In prior studies, I have assessed infants' encoding of an event in which an actor performs a simple goal directed action, reaching for and grasping a toy. The results of these studies indicate that: (1) Six- and nine-month-old infants selectively encode the goal object of such events over other salient spatiotemporal properties; (2) Infants distinguish between animate and inanimate actors in doing this; and, (3) Infants do not selectively encode the contacted object for all events in which a person touches an object. Instead, their encoding of action seems to change as they learn about particular acts. In current work, my students and I are exploring the range of actions that infants construe as goal directed, infants' ability to understand links between actions that are sequenced in service of the same overall goal, and infants' ability to interpret novel actions based on past events.

Early word learning
By the end of the first year of life, infants have begun to acquire word-world linkages. That is, they begin to act as if they understand what some words mean, and can sometimes produce words. In prior work, my collaborators and I found that infants as young as 13 months can learn a new word-object linkage after only brief training in the lab. In current work, I am exploring this early learning ability, assessing the role of early social knowledge in this learning as well as testing when and how infants develop a set of expectations about words as a distinct kind of social signal.

Recent Publications

Woodward, A.L. (in press). Infant cognition. To appear in The Encyclopedia of Cognitive Skills. Nature Publishing Group.

Woodward, A.L. & Guajardo, J.J. (2002). Infants' understanding of the point gesture as an object-directed action. Cognitive Development, 83, 1-24.

Woodward, A. L., Sommerville, J. A., & Guajardo, J. J. (2001).  How infants make sense of intentional action.  In B. Malle, L. Moses, & D. Baldwin (Eds.), Intentions and intentionality: Foundations of social cognition (pp. 149-169). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Regier, T., Corrigan, B., Cabasaan, R., Woodward, A., Gasser, M., & Smith, L. (2001). The emergence of words. In J. Moore & K. Stenning (Eds.), Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 815-820). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Golinkoff, R., Hirsh-Pasek, K.,  Bloom, L., Hollich, G., Smith, L., Woodward, A. L., Akhtar, N., Tomasello, M. & Hollich, G. (Eds.). (2000). Becoming a word learner: A debate on lexical acquisition.  Oxford:  Oxford University Press.

Woodward, A. L. (2000).  Constraining the problem space in early word learning. In R. Golinkoff, K. Hirsh-Pasek, N. Bloom, G. Hollich, L. Smith, A. L. Woodward, L. Akhtar, M. Tomasello, & G.Hollich, (Eds.), Becoming a word learner: A debate on lexical acquisition.(pp. 81-114).  Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Woodward, A. L., & Sommerville, J. A. (2000). Twelve-month-old infants interpret action in context, Psychological Science, 11, 73-76.

Couillard, N. L., & Woodward, A. L. (1999).  Children's comprehension of deceptive points. British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 17, 515-521.

Woodward, A. L. (1999). Infants' ability to distinguish between purposeful and non-purposeful behaviors, Infant Behavior and Development, 22, 145-160.

Woodward, A. L. & Hoyne, K. L. (1999).  Infants' learning about words and sounds in relation to objects. Child Development, 70, 65-77.

Woodward, A. L. (1998).  Infants selectively encode the goal object of an actor's reach. Cognition, 69, 1-34.

Woodward, A. L. &  Markman, E. M. (1998).  Early word learning. In W. Damon, D. Kuhn & R. Siegler, (Eds.),  Handbook of child psychology, Volume 2: Cognition, perception and language  (pp. 371-420).  New York: John Wiley and Sons.

Selected Courses

Psychology 236: Development in Infancy

Psychology 290: Special Honors Seminar

Psychology 232/332: Introduction to Language Development

Psychology 223/323: Introduction to Developmental Psychology

Social Sciences 141: Mind

Seminar: Workshop on Infants' Understanding of People and Objects

Psychology 421: Trial Research Seminar

Workshop on Developing Understandings of Mind