What makes human learning so powerful, flexible, and creative? Can understanding how children explore, test, and revise their beliefs transform how we teach and even how we think about knowledge itself?

Elizabeth Bonawitz, Ph.D., is a cognitive scientist and Associate Professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Her research bridges psychology, philosophy, and computational modeling to explore how children learn about the world. She directs the Computational Cognitive Development Lab, where her team studies how curiosity, evidence, and belief revision interact in early learning. Her work has reshaped how scientists and educators understand learning as an active, hypothesis-driven process rather than passive absorption.

In this conversation, Elizabeth and I explore what makes learning such a deeply human act. She explains how children construct intuitive theories—early mental models that guide their understanding of physics, biology, and even human behavior—and how those models evolve as we encounter new evidence. We talk about her research using storybooks, experiments, and computational simulations to show how children revise beliefs in ways that resemble scientific reasoning.

Elizabeth describes curiosity as the “mise en place” of learning, the mental state that prepares the brain to absorb, connect, and reinterpret new information. Together, we discuss the interplay between curiosity and motivation, the role of trust in testimony, and why even adults rely on social learning to navigate complexity. Our conversation also touches on the importance of recognizing students’ prior beliefs and creating classroom environments that invite safe exploration, critical thinking, and wonder. This episode reminds us that learning is not about memorizing facts but about constructing meaning a process that begins in childhood and never truly ends.