Karen Wynn is an artist and a Canadian and American Yale University Professor Emerita of psychology and cognitive science.

Wynn received her Bachelor of Arts in psychology from McGill University, and her PhD in cognitive science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The first of her many influential research studies on this topic, published in the scientific journal Nature in 1992, reported that five-month-old human infants are able to compute the outcomes of simple addition and subtraction operations on small sets of physical objects.

In both conditions, the set-up was designed so that the infants would witness a mathematical operation being performed (either addition or subtraction), but would not be able to see the final result.

Wynn has suggested that humans, along with many other animal species, are innately endowed with cognitive machinery for detecting and reasoning about numbers of items.

"[5] Wynn's findings were subsequently replicated by independent researchers in the United States and in Europe on human infants[6][7] and later extended to other subject populations, including rhesus monkeys[8] and domesticated dogs[9][10] who, like human babies, distinguished correct from incorrect outcomes of additions and subtractions of objects (eggplants, in the studies with rhesus monkeys; doggie biscuits, in the studies with dogs).

[12] In response to criticism that Wynn's 1992 results were due to infants' ability to keep track of small quantities of objects rather than mathematics, Wynn and Koleen McCrink's 2004 study published in Psychological Science demonstrates that nine-month-old infants can add and subtract numbers that exceed object-tracking limits.

Six-month-olds looked for an equal amount of time at both situations, despite showing a preference for the helper characters in the choice task.

[14] Notable philosopher of bioethics Peter Singer wrote of these studies that they "have upset the previous wisdom, associated with such stellar figures in psychology as Sigmund Freud, Jean Piaget, and Lawrence Kohlberg, that human moral development is the product of our rearing and our culture.

The research suggests that the ability to evaluate an individual based on behavior may serve as a foundation for moral thought and action.

Wynn and her students' further research at Yale continued with this theme, exploring questions such as how infants categorize different individuals into groups and how in-group favoritism develops, as well as investigating adaptive social strategies.

Fellowships are awarded for having "made sustained outstanding contributions to the science of psychology in the areas of research, teaching, and/or application.

Her research can be found in NPR's All Things Considered[36] (2010); in a special report by the National Science Foundation[37] (2011); and on CBS News' 60 Minutes[38] (2012).