Person

Perfors, Amy

Amy Perfors is an Associate Professor at the University of Adelaide's Department of Psychology. Her main responsibilities are research and teaching. She is also convenor of the School's Research Committee and School representative on the Faculty Research Committee. Her research interest focus on many different questions in language and higher-order cognition. Her main interests in language centre on questions of acquisition, evolution, and domain specificity: what biases must children have in order to acquire knowledge in different domains? To what extent are these biases domain-general? How did they emerge? What drives the difference in language acquisition abilities between adults and children? Why does language have the structure it does? In other aspects of cognition, her work focuses on categorisation and concept learning, especially questions of representation, what kinds of assumptions people make about the data they receive, and how people make sensible inductions given sparse or noisy data. Finally, she has an emerging interest in decision making, in particular how people search for, evaluate, and provide evidence in different kinds of problems.