Susan A. Gelman (born July 24, 1957) is currently Heinz Werner Distinguished University Professor of psychology and linguistics and the director of the Conceptual Development Laboratory at the University of Michigan. Gelman studies language and concept development in young children. Gelman subscribes to the domain specificity view of cognition, which asserts that the mind is composed of specialized modules supervising specific functions in the human and other animals. Her book The Essential Child is an influential work on cognitive development. Gelman was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2008 and the National Academy of Sciences in 2012. She has served as the President of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology (2018) and the President of the Cognitive Development Society (2005-2007). Gelman was a founding co-editor of the journal the Annual Review of Developmental Psychology.

Education

Gelman received her B.A., Psychology and Classical Greek from Oberlin College in 1980, and her Ph.D. in psychology, with a Ph.D. minor in Linguistics from Stanford University in 1984. Her PhD advisor was Ellen Markman.

Career

Gelman is currently the Heinz Werner Distinguished University Professor of psychology and linguistics and the director of the Conceptual Development Laboratory at the University of Michigan. She was previously the Frederick G. L. Huetwell professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Research

Gelman directs the Conceptual Development Lab in the Psychology Department of the University of Michigan. Most of the studies conducted at the lab focus on children between the ages of 2 and 10, and are carried out in a home-like laboratory setting or in local preschools and middle schools. Gelman is the author of over 200 publications in psychology research or related articles. Her research focuses on cognitive development, language acquisition, categorization, inductive reasoning, causal reasoning, and the relationship between language and thought. Her books include:

Essentialism

Gelman has been a major contributor to essentialism and relating essentialist ideas to varying aspects in psychology. Gelman's work within the two fields share a familiar subsection: development of children. Her work has established that children, within a given age range, are able to detect underlying essences or root causes for predicting observed behaviors. Gelman's work has yielded insights into how children acquire language. Her book The Essential Child: Origins of Essentialism in Everyday Thought is an influential work on cognitive development and essentialism that has been cited more than 2000 times.

Research areas and topics of interest

Awards

Family

Her younger brother is the statistician Andrew Gelman of Columbia University. The cartoonist Woody Gelman was her uncle.