As of July 2019, I’m Professor Emerita of Yale University – making room in my life to be an artist as well as a scientist. My artist website is mkWynn.com.
For three decades I directed the Infant Cognition Center (“The BabyLab”) first at the University of Arizona and then, for the last two decades of my career, at Yale University, investigating the built-in structures of the human mind. My research asked fundamental questions about how the human mind grasps the world and constructs meaning. In a sentence, I found, across my decades of studying infants, that we humans are rich and complex from the get-go:
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Morality. Do we arrive in the world already equipped with a moral sense? Studies conducted by my students and I in the BabyLab have found that infants prefer “nice,” helpful individuals to “mean” interfering or hindering ones, expect others to prefer the nice ones as well, and want the good individuals to be rewarded & the bad ones punished. Moreover, they will actively pay a considerable cost to shun the mean one – they reject a mean character’s offer of two cookies in favor of a nice character’s offer of a single cookie (even at eight cookies to one babies still won’t choose the mean character’s offering more often than the nice one’s).
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Prejudice. How early do we draw the line between “us” and “them”? Our studies revealed that well before their first birthday, we humans (wee humans) prefer those who share our views & opinions—even trivial ones. More, babies actively endorse punishment of those who don’t. (This was the first and only finding in which I felt let down, perhaps even ‘betrayed’ by my tiny subjects – as I put it, when I saw these irrefutable results “my bleeding liberal heart sank like a stone.”)
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Social Safety Strategies. From the very beginning, we are wired to assess risk and seek safety. Even young infants deploy a repertoire of social strategies: when meeting a stranger, they often launch a “charm & disarm” campaign of smiles and wiggles. But if unease creeps in, they pivot quickly to “raise the alarm” – loud, urgent crying to summon parental protection. Strikingly, while babies readily fuss with their parents to signal discontent, with a stranger they rarely risk mild negativity (which might displease a stranger while being insufficient to recruit a parent); it is mainly wholehearted charm or a full-throated call for rescue.
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Identity. What transformations rupture an individual’s continuity of being? Changes in an object’s size or color may sometimes be surprising, but they do not break our sense of continuity of the object’s existence. But some changes do. We found that when an object fractures or begins to come apart, both babies and adults stop treating it as the same individual – it is no longer recognized within our visual cognition as being the thing seen a moment prior, but is viewed as a new entity not seen before.
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Number. Where does our sense of number come from? Contrary to decades of consensus, I showed that infants have a built-in core of numerical cognition: They can estimate the outcomes of additions and subtractions, can recognize ratios, and can identify numbers of many different kinds of things – objects, actions, sounds – long before acquiring language.
My work has been recognized with major honors from the National Academy of Sciences, the American Psychological Association, the James McKeen Cattell Foundation, and others, and has been featured on 60 Minutes, Anderson Cooper 360, PBS NOVA, National Geographic, and other media. Alumni of my lab now lead research programs across the globe.
Today, as a visual artist, I continue to probe the same questions that animated my science: how we generate meaning, how we carve identity from flux, how we situate ourselves in the social landscape in our search for security. My current methods are different—less empirical, more interpretive—but the pursuit remains the same.
For publications, see my Google Scholar profile.