Deon T. Benton
Assistant Professor of Psychology and Human Development
Deon Benton is an assistant professor of psychology and human development who uses behavioral experiments and computational modeling to study how infants and young children acquire knowledge and concepts. This year he will teach Developmental Psychology (PSY-PC 1250-04) and Neural Network Models of Cognitive Development (PSY-PC 3750-04/7500-04).
Benton recently served as visiting assistant professor of psychology at Swarthmore College and a postdoctoral research fellow at Brown University. He received his Ph.D. and M.S. in developmental psychology from Carnegie Mellon University in 2019 and 2016, respectively. He received his B.A. in psychology from the University of Arizona in 2013.
Representative Publications
Benton, D.T., Kamper, D., Beaton, R.M., & Sobel, D.M. (2023). Don’t throw the associative baby out with the Bayesian bathwater: Children are more associative when reasoning retrospectively under information processing demands. Developmental Science.
Benton, D.T., & Rakison, D.H. (2023). Associative learning or Bayesian inference: Revisiting backwards blocking reasoning in human adults. Cognition.
Benton, D. T. (2022). The Elusive “Developmental Mechanism”: What they are and how to study and test them. Developmental Review, 65, 101034.
Benton, D. T., & Lapan, C. (2022). Moral masters or moral apprentices? A connectionist account of sociomoral evaluation in preverbal infants. Cognitive Development, 62, 101164.
Benton, D. T., Rakison, D. H., & Sobel, D. M. (2021). When correlation equals causation: A behavioral and computational account of second-order correlation learning in children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 202, 105008.
Rakison, D. H., & Benton, D. T. (2019). Second‐order correlation learning of dynamic stimuli: Evidence from infants and computational modeling. Infancy, 24(1), 57-78.
Honors
Steve Reznick Early Career Award