Susan E. Carey (born 1942) is an American psychologist who is a Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. She studies language acquisition, children's development of concepts, conceptual changes over time, and the importance of executive functions. She has conducted experiments on infants, toddlers, adults, and non-human primates. Her books include Conceptual Change in Childhood (1985) and The Origin of Concepts (2009).
Among the ideas that Carey has developed are fast mapping, whereby children learn the meanings of words after a single exposure; extended mapping, folk theories, and Quinian bootstrapping. Her work is considered "the starting point for any serious modern theory of conceptual development."
In 2009, Carey was the first woman to receive the David E. Rumelhart Prize for significant contributions to the theoretical foundation of human cognition. Carey received the 2020 Atkinson Prize in Psychological and Cognitive Sciences for her theory of conceptual change, for which she is credited with having "revolutionized our understanding of how humans construct an understanding of objects, number, living kinds, and the physical world."
Education
Susan Carey was born in 1942 to William N. Carey Jr., a research engineer with the Highway Research Board (HRB), and his first wife, Mary Champine. She attended Ottawa Township High School in Ottawa, Illinois, graduating in 1960.
Susan Carey received her BA from Radcliffe College in 1964. Carey then attended Harvard University. As an undergraduate she did field work with the Tzotzil, a Mayan people in Chiapas. In her junior year she took classes with George Armitage Miller and Jerome Bruner, and worked during the summer as a research assistant with Peter Wason, who was visiting from University College, London. Carey worked with refugees in Tanzania before accepting a Fulbright scholarship in 1965 to work on her M.A. at the University of London. She studied African history at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and attended Wason's laboratory meetings in cognitive studies. Carey began graduate work at Harvard in 1967, receiving her PhD in experimental psychology in 1971.
Career
Carey was employed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 1972 to 1996 in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. Carey credits Hans-Lukas Teuber as an important career mentor who helped determine her direction and Jerry Fodor as an intellectual mentor with whom she argued about the possibility of conceptual change. At MIT, Carey worked alongside George Miller, Jerome Bruner, and Roger Brown and first met Elizabeth Spelke. Carey was an assistant professor at MIT from 1972 to 1977, an associate professor from 1977 to 1984, and a full professor from 1984 to 1996. Carey served as president of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology in 1983-1984.
In 1994, Carey was one of 16 women faculty in the School of Science at MIT who drafted and co-signed a letter to the then-Dean of Science (now Chancellor of Berkeley) Robert Birgeneau, which started a campaign to highlight and challenge gender discrimination at MIT.
In 1996, Carey joined New York University, where she was a professor in the department of psychology from 1996 to 2001. In 2001 she joined the faculty at Harvard University. She became the Henry A. Morss Jr. and Elisabeth W. Morss Professor of Psychology at Harvard as of 2004, the first woman to receive the award.
Carey has served on editorial boards including Cognition, Development Psychology, Memory and Cognition, and Psychological Review.
Research
In 1978 Susan Carey and Elsa Bartlett coined the term "fast mapping". This term refers to the hypothesized mental process where a new concept (e.g. a color name) is learned based only on a single exposure. They also discussed "extended mapping", the process by which children gradually brought the new concept into alignment with their previous understanding of a conceptual space. Carey argues that extended mapping requires both the creation of new primitives for words and hypothesis testing about word meanings. Fast mapping has become a central idea in developmental theories about the learning of words leading to "considerable methodological and theoretical advances". Studies of extended mapping are difficult and less often attempted.