Alan M. Leslie Elected to American Academy of Arts and Sciences

NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. – Alan M. Leslie, director of the Cognitive Development Laboratory at Rutgers University, has been elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the nation’s pre-eminent learned society and research institution. Leslie is professor of psychology and cognitive sciences in Rutgers’ School of Arts and Sciences.

Leslie, a native of Scotland who has taught at Rutgers since 1993, is best known for his research into the child’s “theory of mind”: the development in early childhood of the ability to attribute mental states to oneself and others and to understand that others have beliefs and desires different from one’s own. In 1985, while at the University of London, Leslie was part of a team that ascertained that autistic children have great difficulty with tasks that require them to understand other people’s beliefs.

 Leslie’s colleague Rochel Gelman, professor of psychology and cognitive science and co-director of the Rutgers University Center for Cognitive Science, estimated that 80 percent of the papers written on this topic have cited Leslie.

“Alan has an unbelievably sharp mind, which he puts to use in theoretical or empirical work that always ends up either leading a field or dramatically influencing it,” Gelman said.

Leslie’s laboratory studies the origins of knowledge from the neuroscientific point of view. The faculty and students who work there want to understand what happens in the brain when very young children learn to perceive the relationship between cause and effect, track objects and develop social cognition.

Leslie and his colleagues are collaborating with colleagues at Harvard University and the University of Southern California (USC) on a three-year study, funded by the National Science Foundation, of the evolutionary, developmental and neurobiological sources of moral judgments. His laboratory works with babies and preschool children and children with autism. The Harvard laboratory works with adult primates, and the USC laboratory works with brain-damaged adults.

“We’re particularly interested in trying to establish the relationships between very early moral judgments and theory of mind in preschoolers and even babies,” Leslie said. “How do the very young evaluate people’s actions morally? Can children with autism also make moral judgments?”

Leslie, a resident of Highland Park, is among 16 members of the Rutgers faculty to be elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, which is the nation’s pre-eminent learned society and research institution. The academy’s 2008 class of 190 fellows and 22 foreign honorary members includes U.S. Supreme Court Senior Associate Justice John Paul Stevens; mathematician and philanthropist James H. Simons; soprano Dawn Upshaw; Darwin biographer Janet Browne; Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Edwards P. Jones, and blues guitarist B.B. King.