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.
Representative Publications
- Benton, D. T., & Hoch, J. E. (2026). An associative learning account of how saliva becomes a cue for comfort. Child Development, aacag119.
- Benton, D. T. (2026). Second-order correlation learning in 2-to 4-year-old children, and its underlying mechanism. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 267, 106494.
- Benton, D. T. (2025). An associative-learning account of how infants learn about causal action in animates and inanimates: A critical reexamination of four classic studies. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 154(2), 497–521.
- Benton, D. T., Kamper, D., Beaton, R. M., & Sobel, D. M. (2024). Don't throw the associative baby out with the Bayesian bathwater: Children are more associative when reasoning retrospectively under information processing demands. Developmental Science, 27(3), e13464.
- Benton, D. T., & Rakison, D. H. (2023). Associative learning or Bayesian inference? Revisiting backwards blocking reasoning in adults. Cognition, 241, 105626.
- Benton, D. T. (2022). The elusive “Developmental Mechanism”: What they are and how to study and test them. Developmental Review, 65, 101034.
Honors
- Steve Reznick Early Career Award
- Association for Psychological Science (APS) Rising Star Award
- STEM Innovation Future Forward Award