In 1950, Alan Turing asked "Instead of trying to produce a programme to simulate the adult mind, why not rather try to produce one which simulates the child's?" Today, 75 years later, constructing a computer program that can learn like a child and that develops a human-like general intelligence and consciousness is still considered a grand, if not the ultimate, challenge for artificial intelligence (AI). An interdisciplinary community of scientists from AI, Cognitive Science, Psychology, Engineering, and Neuroscience are tackling this grand challenge. In the Developing Minds global lecture series we showcase the progress being made. It is organized by the Developmental AI Task Force of the IEEE Technical Committee on Cognitive and Developmental Systems of the IEEE Computational Intelligence Society. See also: IEEE Int. Conference on Development and Learning (ICDL), IEEE Transactions on Cognitive and Developmental Systems (TCDS). If you enjoy this lecture series, you may also enjoy the keynote lectures and all oral presentations from the last ICDL conference.

Next Event

Thursday, March 5, 2026

nn:00 am CT (Central Time, USA)

 nn:00 pm UTC (Universal Coordinated Time)

 nn:00 CET (Central European Time)

 nn:00 JST (Japan Standard Time)

Lisa Oakes

UC Davis, USA

"Learning to look and looking to learn: Developmental cascades in infant attention"

Short Bio

Lisa Oakes received her BA in Psychology from UCSD and PhD in Psychology from the University of Texas at Austin. After 15 years as a faculty member at the department of psychology at the University of Iowa, she moved to UC Davis where she is a Distinguished Professor of Psychology and a Faculty Researcher at the Center for Mind and Brain. Dr. Oakes’s work examines cognitive development in infancy, with a particular focus on visual cognitive processes including perception, categorization, and attention. She has written over 100 articles and chapters, edited three volumes, and with David Rakison wrote Developmental cascades: Building the infant mind, which was the 2022 winner of the Eleanor Maccoby Book Award in Developmental Psychology awarded by APA Division 7. She recently wrote a textbook on infant development with Vanessa Lobue and Marianella Casasola entitled Infancy: The development of the whole child. She is the past-president of the International Congress of Infant Studies and currently serves as the editor-in-chief of the journal Infancy. 

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Upcoming Events

• 2026-03-05: Lisa Oakes, UC Davis, USA

• 2026-06-10: Andrew Barto, University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA (10:00 am Boston time)

Previous Events

• 2025-12-04: Jenny Saffran, "Learning to understand: Statistical learning and language development". Video

• 2025-11-13: Tadahiro Taniguchi, "Developing Collective Minds: Symbol Emergence and Co-creative Learning via Collective Predictive Coding". Video

• 2025-10-16: Denis Mareschal, "The challenges and rewards of pursuing real-world Developmental Science". Video

• 2025-09-25: Uri Hasson,  "Developing cognitively feasible learning agents that can acquire language like children through real-life experiences". Video not yet available.

• 2024-12-12: Daniel Messinger, "Does Interaction Drive Development? Lessons from infant emotion, autism, and preschool language". Video

• 2024-11-12: Justin N. Wood, "Radical empiricism: The origins of knowledge as a mini-evolution". Video

• 2024-04-18: Sabine Hunnius, "Early cognitive development: Five lessons from infant learning". Video

• 2024-01-24: Caroline Rowland, "What predicts how quickly children learn language?" Video

• 2023-11-30: Brenden Lake, "Addressing two classic debates in cognitive science with deep learning". Video

• 2023-06-28: Angelo Cangelosi, "Developmental Robotics for Language Learning, Trust and Theory of Mind". Video

• 2023-04-27: Karl Friston, "Active Inference and Artificial Curiosity". Video

• 2023-03-02: Masashi Sugiyama, "Theory and Algorithm towards Reliable Machine Learning". Video

• 2022-12-08: Karen E. Adolph, "Development of intelligent behavior: Lessons from Infants". Video

• 2022-11-17: Gary Marcus, "Towards a Proper Foundation for Robust Artificial Intelligence". Video

• 2022-07-28: Sergey Levine, UC Berkeley, "From Reinforcement Learning to Embodied Learning". Video

• 2022-06-01: Susan Goldin-Meadow, U. of Chicago, "The Mind Hidden in Our Hands". Video

• 2022-03-31 : Atsushi Iriki, Riken, "Self-in-the-world map evolved in the primate brain as a basis of civilized Homo sapiens". Video

• 2022-01-27: Josh Tenenbaum, MIT, "Reverse Engineering Human Cognitive Development: What do we start with, and how do we learn the rest?". Video

• 2021-11-11: Linda B. Smith, Indiana University, "Babies, bodies, brains and machines". Video  

• 2021-09-30: Pierre-Yves Oudeyer, INRIA, "Developmental Artificial Intelligence: machines that learn like children and help children learn better".  Video

Initiators