Lila R. Gleitman Prize

Dr. Dillon’s work forges new territory in foundational questions about human cognition, its development, and its unique status among species. She has explored these questions using classical experimental behavioral approaches among infants, children, and adults, as well as approaches that have allowed her to explore important applications of her findings. In one such line of research, she played a lead role in large-scale field experiments in India, creating intuitive game-like educational interventions aimed at enhancing mathematical understanding in large groups of school children.  The intervention affected aspects of intuitive mathematics, but did not extend to formal mathematics, suggesting the need for different kinds of interventions to improve the latter. Dr. Dillon has also collaborated with computer scientists to determine the extent to which artificial intelligence systems might capture the deep understandings of objects, space, and social principles as shown by infants and by inference, how human intelligence differs from artificial intelligence.

In sum, Dr. Dillon’s work breaks new ground in our understanding of human cognition.  It is highly creative, reflecting wholly new ways of capturing human knowledge of geometry in infancy and its development through adulthood.  Her work exemplifies the essence of Lila R. Gleitman and her foundational role in cognitive science, representing intellectual depth, ingenuity, and significance of the work carried out by Gleitman throughout her long scientific career.  We are delighted to see Moira Dillon continue this legacy by becoming the 2025 winner of the Lila R. Gleitman Prize.

Key selected publications:

Lin, Y. & Dillon, M. R. (2023). We Are Wanderers: Abstract geometry reflects spatial navigation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 153, 386–398.

Stojnić, G., Gandhi, K., Yasuda, S., Lake, B. M., & Dillon, M. R. (2023). Commonsense psychology in human infants and machines. Cognition, 235, 105406.

Hart, Y., Mahadevan, L. & Dillon, M. R. (2022). Euclid’s Random Walk: Developmental changes in the use of simulation for geometric reasoning. Cognitive Science, 46, e13070.

Dillon, M. R. (2021). Rooms without Walls: Young children draw objects but not layouts. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 150(6) 1071–1080.

Dillon, M. R., Kannan, H., Dean, J. T., Spelke, E. S. & Duflo, E. (2017). Cognitive Science in the Field: A preschool intervention durably enhances intuitive but not formal mathematics. Science, 357(6346), 47–55.

Isabelle Dautriche is the recipient of the 2024 Lila R. Gleitman Prize.  Dautriche is a Junior Researcher at the Centre de Recherche en Psychologie et en Neurosciences (CNRS) in Aix-Marselle University, France.  She received her Ph.D. in Cognitive Sciences at the University Paris V, France, following a degree in Engineering (Mathematics and Modeling) at the National Institute of Applied Sciences, Toulouse, France.

In the first decade of her career, Dautriche has made a range of theoretically important, highly original, and rigorous contributions to cognitive science, focusing on language acquisition, language processing, and their intersection with issues core to understanding language more generally.  She has used multiple methods to address these topics, including experimental behavioral work with infants, adults, and other species, as well as state-of-the-art techniques in machine learning, information theory, statistics, and corpus mining. She has used these methods to answer deep questions about how human minds are structured to support language learning, especially aspects of the lexicon, how biases in learning shape the nature of the lexicon in natural languages, and how other species differ from (or are similar to) humans in the patterns they recognize and their capacity for one signature of human language– compositionality.  In pursuing these issues, Dautriche has probed the problem of how we learn different meanings for homophones (e.g., bat, bank), finding that even the youngest learners recruit a variety of types of linguistic information, including syntax, to differentiate two same-sounding forms as having two different meanings.  She has also examined how languages cope with opposing tendencies for wordforms, either maximizing distinct wordforms (to avoid perceptual confusability), or favoring phonological regularity (which would support learning, remembering, and production). Across languages, she has found that languages tend towards the latter, suggesting that processes of learning and memory play an important role in how the lexicons of languages evolve. She has developed new methods to gain insight into previously unstudied aspects of infants’ and toddlers’ word learning, showing that they exhibit a type of metalinguistic understanding of their own knowledge, which is reflected in their varying levels of confidence during word learning trials.  And she has probed for the existence of compositionality in non-human primates, asking whether baboons (like humans) can represent negation and use it in combination with other properties, shedding light on the evolutionary foundations of language.

Dautriche’s work has been intensely collaborative with scientists spanning multiple areas of expertise and seniority, bringing to her work the best of others to enhance the depth and breadth of her research program.  She has also made significant contributions to the teaching of mathematics and developmental linguistics by creating hundreds of instructional videos for the French Khan Academy, and has significantly contributed to the development of the scientific communities to which she has belonged.

Dautriche exemplifies the essence of Lila R. Gleitman and her foundational role in cognitive science, representing the intellectual depth, ingenuity, and significance of the work carried out by Gleitman throughout her long scientific career.  We are delighted to see Isabelle Dautriche continue this legacy by becoming the 2024 winner of the Lila R. Gleitman Prize.

Key selected publications:

Dautriche, I., Buccola, B., Berthet, M., Fagot, J., & Chemla, E. (2022). Evidence for compositionality in baboons (Papio papio) through the test case of negation. Scientific Reports, 12(1), 19181.

Dautriche, I., Goupil, L., Smith, K., & Rabagliati, H. (2022). Two-year-olds’ eye movements reflect confidence in their understanding of words. Psychological Science, 33(11), 1842-1856.

Dautriche, I., Fibla, L., Fievet, A. C., & Christophe, A. (2018). Learning homophones in context: Easy cases are favored in the lexicon of natural languages. Cognitive psychology, 104, 83-105.

Dautriche, I., Mahowald, K., Gibson, E., Christophe, A., & Piantadosi, S. T. (2017). Words cluster phonetically beyond phonotactic regularities. Cognition, 163, 128-145.

Dautriche, I., Swingley, D., & Christophe, A. (2015). Learning novel phonological neighbors: Syntactic category matters. Cognition, 143, 77-86.

Talia Konkle is the recipient of the Inaugural Lila R. Gleitman Prize (2023).  In the first decade of her career, Konkle has made a range of theoretically important, highly original, and rigorous contributions to cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience in our understanding of how the visual system computes representations of objects.  She has used behavioral, neural, and computational modelling methods to converge on answers to the question of how the mind perceives objects and how the brain computes the representations that lead to those perceptions. Examining the mappings of neural responses across the cortex, she has gained insight into the brain’s cognitive architecture, and has developed computational theories that help explain how and why the mind is organized the way it is. Her work has been characterized as embodying the creativity of an artist, the analytic rigor of a scientist, and the technical skill of an engineer.   Konkle has shown deep and active commitment to creating and openly sharing her science and research tools with the vision science community.  She is also known as a gifted communicator and a devoted mentor to younger scholars.