Faculty      

Simone Nguyen, Ph.D.
Thank you for visiting our website! I'm a professor in Developmental Psychology at UNCW. I received my Ph.D. and M.A. in Developmental Psychology from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and my B.A. in Psychology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. My general area of expertise is in the field of cognitive development with a special emphasis on conceptual development in childhood. In particular, my research focuses on categorization and inductive reasoning. Categorization is an important way in which we mentally represent and organize the world into meaningful units. Categories are ubiquitous in our lives; we form categories for a number of things such as people, food, animals, plants, etc. Once we identify the category membership of an item, we're able to access a rich body of knowledge that can be used to reason about that item and to make inductive inferences or generalizations about other items in the same category. For example, thinking of someone as a woman, a professor, a surfer, and so on, helps us to understand the complex behavior of a single person and provides insights regarding how to interact with this person and others in the same categories on different occasions. If you have any questions about this research, please do not hesitate to contact me.