Deon T. Benton, Ph.D.

Affiliations:			Brown University, Providence, RI
			Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA

Area:

causal thinking in infants, children, & adults, computational modelling, behavior, cognition, development

Website:

https://sites.google.com/view/deonbenton

Google:

"Deon T. Benton"

Bio:

Dr. Deon T. Benton is a postdoctoral research associate at Brown University. He works in the Causality and Mind Lab.
Deon earned his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh, PA in July 2019. The focus of Deon's doctoral dissertation was on how infants and adults represent complex causal event sequences, whether these representations undergo change from infancy to adulthood, and what the mechanism is that supports these representations.
While at CMU, Deon was a recipient of the National Science Foundation GRFP and the Richard Kind Mellon Presidential fellowships. In his current research, Deon explores the development of causal reasoning during early childhood and the mechanisms that underpin it. One such project uses behavioral methods and computational modeling to examine 2-, 3-, and 4-year-old children's use of second-order correlation learning to infer causal relations. For example, if object A possesses feature B and object A causes effects in other objects, will children infer that a novel object that is shown to possess feature B is also causally efficacious?
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