I am interested in how children and AI systems achieve efficient, flexible learning from limited data, and what this tells us about the principles of human cognition and the design of better AI.

My research interests can be categorized into the following three strands:

1. Abstraction & Analogy:

How do learners detect structure, form analogies, and generalize beyond surface features?

2. Active Exploration:

How do intrinsic motivations like information gain and empowerment drive learners to intervene and build causal models?

3. Curriculum Learning:

How does the sequencing of experiences shape learning trajectories and support generalization?

Yiu, E., Allen, K.R., Ginosar, S., & Gopnik, A. (in press). Empowerment Gain and Causal Model Construction: Children and adults are sensitive to controllability and variability in their causal interventions. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, Special Issue: World models, A(G)I, and the Hard problem(s) of life–mind continuity).

Yiu, E., Qraitem, M., Majhi, A. N., Wong, C., Bai, Y., Ginosar, S., Gopnik, A. & Saenko, K. (2025). KiVA: Kid-inspired visual analogies for testing large multimodal models (project page). In International Conference on Learning Representations.

Goddu, M.*, Yiu, E.*, & Gopnik, A. (2025). Causal relational problem solving in toddlers. Cognition, 254, 105959.

Dahmani, A.*, Yiu, E.*, & Gopnik, A. (2025). Children Spontaneously Design Curricula to Tackle Challenging Tasks. In CogSci.

Yiu, E., Sandbrink, K., & Gopnik, A. (2024). Children prioritize purely exploratory actions in observe-vs.-bet tasks. In CogSci.

Yiu, E., Kosoy, E., & Gopnik, A. (2023). Transmission versus truth, imitation versus innovation: What children can do that large language and language-and-vision models cannot (yet). Perspectives on Psychological Science, 17456916231201401.

Wu, W.Y., Yiu, E., Ophir, A. G., & Smith, D. M. (2023). Effects of Social Context Manipulation on Dorsal and Ventral Hippocampal Neuronal Responses. Hippocampus.

Yiu, E., Collins, J., & Gopnik, A. (2022). Three-Dimensional Object Completion in Humans and Computational Models. In CogSci.

Bambha, V. P., Beckner, A. G., Shetty, N., Voss, A. T., Xie, J., Yiu, E., ... & Casasola, M. (2022). Developmental Changes in Children’s Object Insertions during Play. Journal of Cognition and Development, 1-20.