Alison Gopnik is Professor of Psychology and Affiliate Professor of Philosophy at Berkeley University, California. She is known, amongst many other things, for developing the "theory theory", championing children's capacity to employ theory-based reasoning. She was the first cognitve scientist to apply probabilistic models to children’s learning, particularly using the causal Bayes net framework. In the past 15 years she has applied computational ideas to many areas of early cognitive development, including the learning of physical and social concepts.