About Me
Dr. Woolley is a Professor of Psychology and the Director of the Children’s Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. She received her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology in 1990 from the University of Michigan.
“My research addresses children’s understanding of reality, a topic with a long history that continues to intrigue and perplex developmental psychologists. Knowledge about how children evaluate new information and make proper assignment of entities to real and not-real categories is especially critical in the media-rich age in which we live. Young children are bombarded with information and images offering a mix of the real and the fantastical, including Elmo, a monster who teaches children about science, and Harry Potter, a human child performing magic spells. Amidst this, children continuously encounter novel entities and events, and must assign these entities and events to their proper (real or not real) categories.”
Interests
Conceptual development in preschool and elementary school children, concept of mind, religious cognition, and fantasy-reality distinction.
Goals
The goal of my research is to investigate how children make reality status judgments when they encounter novel information.
I am assessing the effects of three broad classes of factors:
(1) Characteristics of the individual child (e.g., age)
(2) Characteristics of the stimulus (e.g., internal consistency of the attributes of a novel entity)
(3) Effects of the environment (e.g., the context in which children encounter a novel entity).
All of these are proposed to affect how children evaluate the reality status of novel entities and events. It is imperative that children be taught to think critically about new information. To do this, researchers and educators must first understand how children identify and separate real from unreal. The findings of the studies in my lab have important implications for preschool and elementary education, parenting, and clinical practice with young children. My research is partially funded by the John Templeton Foundation.