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About Us

Professor Renée Baillargeon

Director, Infant Cognition Lab

I was born and raised in Québec, Canada, the third child of French-Canadian parents. I attended French-speaking schools until 1972 when I moved to Montréal and enrolled at McGill University as a Psychology major. After graduating (with First Class Honors) from McGill, I joined the doctoral program of the Psychology Department of the University of the University of Pennsylvania. Under the supervision of Rochel Gelman and Liz Spelke, I conducted experiments on young children's and

infants' understanding of physical events. During my five years at the University of Pennsylvania (1976-1981), I was supported by fellowships from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (four years) and the Québec Ministry of Education (one year).

I spent the following academic year (1981-1982) at the MIT Center for Cognitive Science on a post-doctoral fellowship I received from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. The following year, I became an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. During that year, I was recruited by the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where I moved the following year (1984) and have remained ever since. I was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor in 1989, and to that of Full Professor in 1994.

My research focuses primarily on the development of infants' knowledge about physical events. The two main questions I have been addressing are: (1) What expectations do infants possess, at different ages, about various physical events (e.g., occlusion, containment, support, and collision events); and (2) How do infants attain this knowledge. This research has been funded by grants from NICHD as well as by awards from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Research Board and the Center for Advanced Study of the University of Illinois. In 1989, I won the McCandless Young Scientist Award (APA Division 7), and was also named a University Scholar at the University of Illinois. In 1993, I was made a Fellow of the American Psychological Society. In addition to these research awards, I have also received teaching awards from both undergraduate and graduate students' organizations at the University of Illinois.

In the Lab...

When you come to the lab you will find that the experiments are run by teams of students and graduate research assistants who work under Professor Baillargeon's direction.

The lab is supervised by Laura Brueckner who has worked for Professor Baillargeon since 1984. Laura has an undergraduate degree in psychology and a master's in social work, both from the University of Illinois.

Yuyan Luo and Suhua Wang are graduate students working with Professor Baillargeon. Yuyan has been at the University of Illinois since August, 1998. She is from Chengdu, China, and attended Peking University. Her doctoral research is about how infants differentiate between animate and inanimate objects. She hopes to continue doing infancy research when she returns to China.

Suhua Wang is from Taiwan and attended National Taiwan University. While taking a course in cognitive development she read one of Professor Baillargeon's papers, which sparked her interest in infant cognitive development. Her doctoral research project is about how infants reason about the weight of objects.

Venessa Nolen works in several capacities in the lab. She supervises experiments several times a week, calls our newest babies to set up appointments, and manages our subject data base. Venessa is an undergraduate finance major and the mother of a two-year-old.

Sharon Buckert is our new appointment scheduler. Sharon has worked in the psychology Department for 9 years, but only began working for us this August. She replaced Carolyn McGinley who worked with us for 10 years before retiring and moving to Indiana. We are very happy to have Sharon working with us in the lab.