Tone Kristine Hermansen

• Cognitive development
• Question asking
• Curiosity
• Social-cognitive learning

Research interests: An overarching goal of my work is to further our understanding of children’s early cognitive development.

In my most recent line of research, I have dedicated one set of studies to exploring how preschool children understand, make use of, and even influence the information they encounter through social interactions. In another set of studies, I am currently developing new experimental designs to further our understanding of how children eventually come to question the information they encounter, and the individual and social determinants of such behaviors. Specifically, I seek to investigate children’s ability to detect knowledge gaps or information inconsistencies, and their propensity to resolve such discrepancies. I also assess the impact of children’s early conversational environments on their emerging epistemological understanding and how this affects their learning and development. Together, these studies provide essential contributions to our understanding of children’s emerging critical stance, how this affects their cognitive development and learning, and the influence of social interactions on this process.

In a previous line of research, I have investigated children’s development following an atypical pre- and postnatal rearing environment, as indicated by maternal depressive episodes. Motivated by the notion that women who experience depression during pregnancy and the early child-rearing period often show an atypical interaction style when engaging with their child, I investigated whether such alterations affected children’s long-term cognitive, social, and behavioral development. Across these studies, I combined the use of traditional psychological assessments tools with experimental designs and neuroimaging methods.

Contact information:

Mail: t.k.hermansen@psykologi.uio.no

Website: https://www.sv.uio.no/psi/english/people/aca/tonekhe/index.html