Profile: Brenda Caldwell Phillips

Brenda completed her undergraduate studies in psychology at Penn State University. She also completed a master´s degree in clinical psychology at Saint Michael´s College prior to pursuing a PhD in cognitive psychology at Boston University. In her doctoral thesis, Brenda studied the acquisition and development of artifact and natural kind concepts in early childhood. In a secondary line of research, Brenda has examined how nonhuman primates parse complex events by attending to goals and intentions that underlie agents´ actions.

Brenda is currently a postdoctoral research associate for the AHRC Culture and the Mind Project , an interdisciplinary research project that examines key philosophical questions pertaining to the cognitive and evolutionary underpinnings of culture. Brenda conducts her research at the Hang Seng Centre for Cognitive Studies. Her domains of study include the philosophy of psychology, comparative cognition, moral psychology, and language development. She is particularly interested in the broad question of what aspects of the mind are uniquely human, as well as what cognitive mechanisms are foundational in the acquisition of cultural knowledge.

Publications

• Phillips, B., Kelemen, D., & Seston, R. (In preparation). Young children can categorize
  novel tools by eavesdropping on others' intentional acts.
• Phillips, B., Berko Gleason, J., & Ely, R. (In preparation). “Look at that nice dog!”
  Parents’ use of language to direct children’s attention to the world.
• Belle, D., & Phillips, B. (In press). Impediments to parental monitoring in the after-
  school hours. In V. Guilamo-Ramos, P. Dittus, & J. Jaccard (Eds.), Parental Monitoring of Adolescents.
• Berko Gleason, J., Phillips, B., Ely, R., & Zaretsky, E. (In press). Alligators all
  around: The acquisition of animal terms in English and Russian. In E. Lieven
  and J. Guo (Eds.), Crosslinguistic Approaches to the Psychology of Language: Research in the Tradition of Dan Isaac Slobin. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
• Wood, J., Glynn, D., Phillips, B., & Hauser, M.D. (2007, September). The perception of goal-directed, rational action in non-human primates, Science, 317,
  1402-1405.
• Belle, D., & Phillips, B. (2004). Children’s experiences in the after-school
  hours. In A.G. Cosby, R.E. Greenberg, L. Hill Southward, & M. Weitzman (Eds.), About Children: An authoritative resource on the state of childhood today. American Academy of Pediatrics.

Contact

Brenda Caldwell Phillips
Hang Seng Centre for Cognitive Studies
Humanities Research Institute
The University of Sheffield
34 Gell Street
Sheffield
S3 7QY

Telephone: 0114 222 6117

Fax: 0114 222 9894

Email: b.c.phillips@sheffield.ac.uk