Renée Baillargeon is an Alumni Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her research examines cognitive development in infancy and focuses primarily on causal reasoning. In particular, she explores how infants make sense of the events they observe, and what explanatory frameworks and learning mechanisms enable them to do so. In addition to this primary focus on causal reasoning, she is interested in a broad range of related issues including object perception, categorization, object individuation, number, and executive-function skills.