The Department of Psychology welcomed a new assistant professor this year. Daniel Yurovsky comes to the University of Chicago from Stanford University where he was a postdoctoral fellow after receiving a PhD in Cognitive Psychology from Indiana University. Yurovsky studies how we learn from the people around us, and especially how children learn language. Children learn the meanings of thousands of words by the time they can run down the street. Yet, these same children continuously forget where they left their hats and coats. Yurovsky's work aims to explain this puzzle from a systems perspective: successes (and failures) of learning emerge from the coordination between cognitive constraints and the learning environment.

Yurovsky's research combines behavioral and eye-tracking experiments with infants, children, and adults and computational models that describe the connection between learners and their environment. For example, in one line of research, Yurovsky and his collaborators have been investigating the ways in which parents tune their communication to support communication with their children. This work shows that parents are highly contingent on younger children, but provide less and less scaffolding as children become more proficient speakers and learners of language. As the head of the Communication and Learning Lab, Yurovsky is excited about applying new Big Data methods to bear on classic questions in developmental psychology.