About

Annie E. Wertz received her B.A. in Psychology from Boston University in 2003 and her Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2009. She then worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the Infant Cognition Center at Yale University, where she began developing a novel research area exploring the cognitive systems infants use to learn about plants. In 2014, she was awarded funding from the Max Planck Society to pursue this research as an independent Research Group Leader at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin. Dr. Wertz joined the UCSB Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences in March 2024 and founded the Lab for Infant Learning and Cognition (LILAC). Her work investigates cognitive development from an evolutionary perspective, focusing on how infants and young children learn about plants, an often overlooked aspect of the natural world. Her research has provided the first evidence that human infants possess behavioral and social learning strategies that are selective to plants, such as avoiding plant dangers and selectively learning about edible plants. Her projects aim to elucidate the structure of cognitive systems for learning about the natural world in infancy and early childhood, and how these systems contribute to early development in social learning, food learning, threat avoidance, and cultural acquisition. Dr. Wertz conducts studies with infants and young children both in the lab and in naturalistic outdoor settings, engaging in cross-cultural and comparative studies to understand the evolutionary and developmental factors that enable humans to learn from others and adapt to changing environments.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Social psychology
• Cognitive psychology
• Developmental psychology
• Psychology
• Philosophy
• Epistemology

Selected publications

• FEED your mind: The evolutionary roots of human food cognition

  2025-04-30

  preprintOpen access

  Research on food cognition has largely overlooked that our modern food environment strongly differs from the environment in which our ancestors lived. When foraging for food in wild environments, our ancestors had to distinguish edible food resources from myriad inedible and potentially toxic entities. In contrast, in most cultures today, many decisions about food are made during a trip to the grocery store or a meal at a restaurant, where we might ask ourselves: Is this item healthy? but certainly not: Is this item edible or toxic? Here we argue that the scope of the problem humans faced with respect to food included navigating through wild environments to Find candidate food items, Evaluating the nutritional benefits of the potential foods, Excluding the costs of making a mistake and consuming a harmful food item, and Deciding which food items to ingest and include in their diet. We call this the FEED problem and argue that it provides an organizing framework for thinking about the wide array of cognitive processes involved in human food psychology. The FEED problem can also be used as a generative theory to produce new testable empirical predictions about what cognitive mechanisms drive our modern food behaviors and provides a roadmap for future research in the field of food cognition.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Expectations about plant edibility in 6-month-old infants (Rioux & Wertz)

  2025-09-24

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  Watching what others put in their mouths is a powerful way to learn what to eat. Yet human diets and eating behaviors are complicated, and not everything that goes into another person's mouth is food: The fusilli is edible, but the fork is not. Therefore, some selectivity is necessary to guide social learning processes about food. Here we examined 6-month-old infants' expectations about what kinds of entities are likely to be edible using a violation-of-expectation setup in which infants viewed an actor eating from two different items. We hypothesized that infants may have selective edibility expectations about plants, and in particular fruits, that stem from humans' long evolutionary history of foraging wild plant foods and specialization in higher caloric density plant parts. In Experiment 1 (N = 40), we found that infants expect plants, relative to feature-matched artifacts, to be edible, replicating a previous finding [Wertz & Wynn, 2014a]. In Experiments 2 (N = 40) and 3 (N = 39), we examined, for the first time, whether selective expectations about plant edibility are tied to particular plant parts. Our results showed that infants do not differentially expect leaves to be edible, but our results for fruits were inconsistent. Taken together, these findings suggest that infants differentially expect plants to be edible, and that these expectations appear to be strongest for whole plants.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Hot hand thinking in children

  Evolution and Human Behavior · 2025-08-14

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Expectations about plant edibility in 6-month-old infants

  Evolution and Human Behavior · 2025-11-05

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  Watching what others put in their mouths is a powerful way to learn what to eat. Yet human diets and eating behaviors are complicated, and not everything that goes into another person's mouth is food: The fusilli is edible, but the fork is not. Therefore, some selectivity is necessary to guide social learning processes about food. Here we examined 6-month-old infants' expectations about what kinds of entities are likely to be edible using a violation-of-expectation setup in which infants viewed an actor eating from two different items. We hypothesized that infants may have selective edibility expectations about plants, and in particular fruits, that stem from humans' long evolutionary history of foraging wild plant foods and specialization in higher caloric density plant parts. In Experiment 1 ( N = 40), we found that infants expect plants, relative to feature-matched artifacts, to be edible, replicating a previous finding [ Wertz & Wynn, 2014a ]. In Experiments 2 ( N = 40) and 3 ( N = 39), we examined, for the first time, whether selective expectations about plant edibility are tied to particular plant parts. Our results showed that infants do not differentially expect leaves to be edible, but our results for fruits were inconclusive. Taken together, these findings suggest that infants differentially expect plants to be edible and that these expectations appear to be strongest for whole plants.

  PublisherDOI

• Eat your vegetables: Exploring food learning cues in 12-month-old infants

  2025-06-27

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  Food learning in early life largely relies on social learning. Previous research has shown that infants learn something is edible when they directly observe someone else eating it. However, the role of other forms of food-related social information remains largely unknown. Food processing actions (e.g., chopping, mashing) are essential components of human food behaviors and a ubiquitous part of infants’ everyday lives. Here we examined whether infants (i) differentially attend to eating and food processing actions compared to control actions and (ii) learn that novel foods are edible after observing eating and food processing actions performed with them. To do this, we tested 12-month-olds’ responses to three different actions: eating, food processing, and a food-irrelevant control. First, we showed infants side-by-side videos of an adult performing two different actions with novel foods across three between-subjects conditions and measured their gaze and pupil dilation with an eye-tracker. Then, we offered infants the novel foods shown in the videos and measured their choices and eating behaviors. Our eye-tracking results indicate that infants differentially attend to eating and food processing actions relative to the control action, and show increased pupil dilation for the control action relative to the two food-relevant actions. When asked to choose which novel food they could eat, infants chose the novel food they saw an actor eat, but only when that eating action was paired with the control action. These findings help identify important mechanisms that increase acceptance of healthy foods early in life.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Infants’ Social Evaluation of Helpers and Hinderers: A Large‐Scale, Multi‐Lab, Coordinated Replication Study

  Developmental Science · 2024-11-26 · 31 citations

  articleOpen access

  Evaluating whether someone's behavior is praiseworthy or blameworthy is a fundamental human trait. A seminal study by Hamlin and colleagues in 2007 suggested that the ability to form social evaluations based on third-party interactions emerges within the first year of life: infants preferred a character who helped, over hindered, another who tried but failed to climb a hill. This sparked a new line of inquiry into the origins of social evaluations; however, replication attempts have yielded mixed results. We present a preregistered, multi-laboratory, standardized study aimed at replicating infants' preference for Helpers over Hinderers. We intended to (1) provide a precise estimate of the effect size of infants' preference for Helpers over Hinderers, and (2) determine the degree to which preferences are based on social information. Using the ManyBabies framework for big team-based science, we tested 1018 infants (567 included, 5.5-10.5 months) from 37 labs across five continents. Overall, 49.34% of infants preferred Helpers over Hinderers in the social condition, and 55.85% preferred characters who pushed up, versus down, an inanimate object in the nonsocial condition; neither proportion differed from chance or from each other. This study provides evidence against infants' prosocial preferences in the hill paradigm, suggesting the effect size is weaker, absent, and/or develops later than previously estimated. As the first of its kind, this study serves as a proof-of-concept for using active behavioral measures (e.g., manual choice) in large-scale, multi-lab projects studying infants.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Grass and gravel: Investigating visual properties preschool children and adults use when distinguishing naturalistic images

  Cognitive Development · 2023-03-20 · 3 citations

  articleSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• On the Problems Solved by Cognitive Processes

  Cognitive Science · 2023-06-01 · 4 citations

  letterOpen accessSenior author

  Cognitive scientists have focused too narrowly on the acquisition of data and on the methods to extract patterns from those data. We argue that a successful science of the mind requires widening our focus to include the problems being solved by cognitive processes. Frameworks that characterize cognitive processes in terms of instrumental problem-solving, such as those within the evolutionary social sciences, become necessary if we wish to discover more accurate descriptions of those processes.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• On The Problems Solved By Cognitive Processes

  2023-04-25

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  In our rush to build a rigorous science, we worry that a misstep is currently taking place: that too much emphasis is being placed on descriptive or predictive research, with not enough emphasis being placed on what cognitive processes are for—the problems that these processes have been genetically and culturally evolved to solve.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Visual segmentation of complex naturalistic structures in an infant eye-tracking search task

  PLoS ONE · 2022-04-01 · 4 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  An infant's everyday visual environment is composed of a complex array of entities, some of which are well integrated into their surroundings. Although infants are already sensitive to some categories in their first year of life, it is not clear which visual information supports their detection of meaningful elements within naturalistic scenes. Here we investigated the impact of image characteristics on 8-month-olds' search performance using a gaze contingent eye-tracking search task. Infants had to detect a target patch on a background image. The stimuli consisted of images taken from three categories: vegetation, non-living natural elements (e.g., stones), and manmade artifacts, for which we also assessed target background differences in lower- and higher-level visual properties. Our results showed that larger target-background differences in the statistical properties scaling invariance and entropy, and also stimulus backgrounds including low pictorial depth, predicted better detection performance. Furthermore, category membership only affected search performance if supported by luminance contrast. Data from an adult comparison group also indicated that infants' search performance relied more on lower-order visual properties than adults. Taken together, these results suggest that infants use a combination of property- and category-related information to parse complex visual stimuli.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Brent Strickland

  Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

  14 shared

• David Pietraszewski

  Max Planck Institute for Human Development

  12 shared

• Ghislaine Labouret

  Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique

  11 shared

• Karola Schlegelmilch

  Leipzig University

  10 shared

• Claudia Elsner

  Max Planck Institute for Human Development

  9 shared

• Karen Wynn

  Clinical Trial Investigators

  9 shared

• Andreas Falck

  University of Oslo

  9 shared

• Véronique Izard

  Université Paris Cité

  7 shared

Awards & honors

• Human Behavior and Evolution Society’s Margo Wilson Award fo…
• Inaugural Don Symons Adaptationism Award (2023)