Professor Norman Freeman
M.A., Ph.D.(Cantab.), F.B.Ps.S.
Current positions
Emeritus Professor of Cognitive Development
School of Psychological Science
Contact
Press and media
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Research interests
I work in cognition, mostly trying to model and test hypotheses about representational development, where I have invented a few experimental techniques. I focused initially on picture-production and have moved to analysing the conceptual change in children’s beliefs about pictures, their theory of pictures. The application was in art-education, where I have been active. When I began, there had been no hypothesis-testing tradition with children's pictorial representation (apart from one precocious study in 1897). I published methods for posing simple pictorial puzzles, and rules for inferring children's strategies of bringing visual order onto a page. My second aim had been to acquire a range of cognitive research skills so as to be able flexibly to promote research as and when circumstances demanded. I transferred the same set of research habits collaboratively to publish refereed papers on topics as diverse as phonological impairment, effects of early cardiac surgery, semantic change, infant spatial search, theory-of-mind inference, early counting. All illuminate the complexity of representational changes.
Projects and supervisions
Research projects
POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWSHIP
Principal Investigator
Managing organisational unit
School of Psychological ScienceDates
01/01/2004 to 01/01/2005
DEVELOPMENT OF WRITING AS A DOMAIN OF SKILLED PERFORMANCE
Principal Investigator
Managing organisational unit
School of Psychological ScienceDates
01/01/1999 to 01/01/2000
Thesis supervisions
Publications
Recent publications
01/03/2020Children readily think about people’s minds when they think about artworks
Empirical studies of the arts
Young children show representational flexibility when interpreting drawings
Cognition
Educating the design stance
Behavioral and Brain Sciences
Flexible and inflexible response components: A Stroop study with typewritten output
Acta Psychologica
Belief-emotion lag and the child's idea of heroism: can the curse of knowledge lift for dispositional inference?
Hellenic Journal of Psychology (special issue on theory of mind)