David Moore

During his fellowship year, David Moore will work on a book detailing what developmental science can contribute to efforts to build artificial general intelligence. Despite the ability of neural networks like GPT4 to generate text that is often indistinguishable from human-produced text, artificial intelligence (AI) systems still lack the common sense that people acquire naturally as we mature. Developmental cognitive scientists have elaborated an understanding of how human minds change as we develop from infancy, but this understanding has only rarely been utilized by researchers creating AI. Leveraging hard-won insights about development in infancy could dramatically improve our “intelligent” machines.

Moore is a professor of psychology at Pitzer College and Claremont Graduate University. A developmental scientist with expertise in infant cognition, his empirical research examines the development of mental rotation and electrophysiological correlates of covert attention in infants. His theoretical writings explore how genetic, environmental, and epigenetic factors contribute to development. His book The Developing Genome (Oxford University Press, 2015) won the William James and Eleanor Maccoby Book Awards from the American Psychological Association (APA). He has served as the Director of the National Science Foundation’s Developmental Sciences Program and is a Fellow of the APA.

For more information, please visit: http://pzacad.pitzer.edu/~dmoore/