- Alan M. Leslie
Infobox Scientist
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name = Alan M. Leslie
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residence =United States
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nationality = Scottish
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field =Psychologist
work_institutions =Rutgers University
alma_mater =University of Edinburgh University of Oxford
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known_for = Autism research
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footnotes =Alan M. Leslie is a Scottish
psychologist and Professor of Psychology and Cognitive science atRutgers University where he directs the Cognitive Development Laboratory.Education
Leslie completed his undergraduate degree in Psychology and Linguistics at the
University of Edinburgh in 1974 and received hisD.Phil. inExperimental Psychology from theUniversity of Oxford in 1979/80.Academic career
For a number of years he was a Medical Research Council Senior Scientist at the University of London. He joined the faculty at
Rutgers University in 1993. He has also worked as a visiting professor at the Universidad Autonoma inMadrid, Spain , theUniversity of Chicago , and theUniversity of California, Los Angeles . In 2005 he gave the XIII Kanizsa Memorial Lecture at the University of Trieste and in 2006 he was the inaugural recipient of the Ann L. Brown Award for Excellence in Developmental Research. In 2008 Dr. Leslie was designated a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science [http://www.psychologicalscience.org/fellows/] and he was also elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences [http://www.amacad.org/news/new2008.aspx] .Research
Leslie was a member of the team in
London who, in 1985, discovered thetheory of mind impairment inautism . Autism manifests as the inability to communicate with others, and an obsession with a restricted repertoire of activities. In 1985 Alan Leslie, along withSimon Baron-Cohen andUta Frith , published the famous article "Does the autistic child have a 'theory of mind'?" in which it was suggested that children with autism have particular difficulties with tasks requiring the child to understand another person's beliefs.He is interested in the design of the cognitive system early in development. He has contributed a number of influential experimental studies and theoretical ideas on the perception of cause and effect, object tracking, and agent detection in infancy, the developmental role of
modularity of mind , and the Theory of Mind Mechanism (ToMM) in the development ofsocial cognition and its impairment in autism.Family
His daughter,
Sarah-Jane Leslie , is an assistant professor ofphilosophy atPrinceton University .References
*
* Citation
last = Leslie
first = Alan M.
year = 1987
title = Pretense and Representation: The Origin of 'Theory of Mind'
publisher = Psychological Review
volume = 94
issue = 4
pages = 412-426
url = http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/~aleslie/Leslie%201987b%20Psychological%20Review.pdf
accessdate = 2008-01-24
* [http://www.psychologicalscience.org/fellows/ 2008 Fellows of the American Psychological Society]External links
* [http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/~aleslie/index.html Cognitive Development Lab at Rutgers University]
* [http://www.psico.units.it/convegni/kanlect/2005/index.php3 XIIIth Kanizsa Memorial Lecture]
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