David Barner

About

David Barner is a professor in the Department of Psychology at UC San Diego. His research interests focus on language, thought, and conceptual development, with particular attention to case studies involving number, time, space, and logical reasoning. He employs a cross-cultural approach in his studies, conducting research in diverse regions including India, Japan, Latin America, China, and Eastern Europe. His work aims to understand how these fundamental cognitive domains develop and vary across different cultural contexts, contributing to the broader understanding of human cognition and language development.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Psychology
• Political Science
• Natural Language Processing
• Artificial Intelligence
• Mathematics
• Social psychology
• Cognitive psychology
• Linguistics
• Statistics

Selected publications

• Do children use language structure to discover the recursive rules of counting?

  Cognitive Psychology · 2020 · 45 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  DOI

• Counting and the ontogenetic origins of exact equality

  Cognition · 2021 · 28 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  DOI

• Children are sensitive to reputation when giving to both ingroup and outgroup members

  Journal of Experimental Child Psychology · 2020 · 28 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  DOI

• Can preschoolers learn the syntax of number? Using rules to combine familiar and novel number words

  Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences · 2025-10-20 · 4 citations

  articleSenior author

  Although children can combine words to express meanings like 'red house' or 'two cats', they do not represent number words compositionally (e.g. 'twenty-six' as 6+20) until late in development. One reason for this might be that smaller number words in most languages are not composed via rules, limiting children's exposure to the syntactic structure underlying larger number words. However, historically, many languages have featured number systems with smaller bases or anchors, thus relying more o…

  PublisherDOI

• Two-Year-Olds Reason About Multiple Mutually Exclusive Possibilities

  2026-05-23

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  A prominent hypothesis in the literature on logical reasoning suggests that, unlike human adults and older children, 3-year-olds deploy “minimal representation of possibility” when reasoning about the existence of a reward in one of two possible locations. On this view, children are unable to represent two mutually exclusive possibilities simultaneously, and instead commit to one location for the reward in a pair of possible locations, only considering the second location once they have evidence…

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Collaborative Research: Language structure and number word learning

  NSF · $773k · 2014–2018

• Collaborative Research: Development of symbolic and non-symbolic representations of exact equality

  NSF · $712k · 2020–2025

• How do children construct linguistic color categories?

  NSF · $400k · 2015–2019

Frequent coauthors

• Mahesh Srinivasan

  University of California, Berkeley

  46 shared

• Rose M. Schneider

  University of California, San Diego

  35 shared

• Neon Brooks

  Kaiser Permanente Center for Health Research

  32 shared

• Alan Bale

  29 shared

• Roman Feiman

  Hologic (Germany)

  28 shared

• Jessica Sullivan

  University of New Mexico

  27 shared

• Peggy Li

  Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

  24 shared

• Ruthe Foushee

  22 shared

Similar researchers at University of California, San Diego

• Sandra Brownh-100
• Adam Aronh-70
• Karen Dobkinsh-40