David R. Olson

Under Bruner's sponsorship, Olson explored young children’s mental representations of space, particularly how children's language influenced their ability to reconstruct spatial patterns. He found that while children had no difficulty reconstructing horizontal and vertical patterns, they had great difficulties with diagonals before they went to school. It seems that to succeed in conceptualizing a diagonal, it has to be reconceived in terms of relations between horizontal and vertical axes. This research led to his first book, Spatial Cognition: The Child's Acquisition of Diagonality. (Erlbaum, 1970)

In the 1970s, Olson began a research program on children's understanding of language and meaning, advancing the claim that young children fail to make a distinction between what is "said" and what is "meant." This led to a program of research on children's awareness of language and their understanding of mind. Along with Janet Astington, Alison Gopnik, and Lynd Forguson, Olson conducted pioneering work on the origins of the concept of belief and intention that led to the publication of the volume "Developing Theories of Mind" (Edited by Astington, Harris, and Olson), (CUP, 1988). See Astington, 2000 for an account of research in this period.

Olson moved to Toronto in 1966 and has taught there ever since. He is recognized as a world authority on the psychological implications of literacy, a topic on which he has published widely and lectured around the world. He is cross-appointed to University College and the University of Toronto. He holds honorary degrees from the Gothenburg University (Sweden), the University of Saskatchewan, and the University of Toronto. He is Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Olson is married and has five children.

When he began his studies, psychology made little allowance for language, let alone writing, as a cognitive resource in the mental lives of persons. Language achieved its place in cognitive theory and cognitive development in the 1960s due in large part to the work of Noam Chomsky, Roger Brown, and Jerome Bruner. Aside from some pointers to the significance of writing and a written language in the work of Lev Vygotsky (1987), writing had remained outside the purview of experimental cognitive psychology, and was accorded no role in the developmental process. In this context Olson advanced the revolutionary argument that, far from being an instrument for the convenient transmission of speech, writing is responsible in large part for shifting the speaker's attention from the ordinary pragmatic functions of language to the phonological, semantic, and syntactic properties of the language itself. Learning to be literate, Olson argued, was to learn to think about the properties of language that remain largely implicit in ordinary oral or natural language. This process leads to a new awareness of phonology, the definition of words, and the logical relations among sentences. Ironically, it is these literate properties of language that have dominated the concerns of philosophers, linguists, and psychologists who believe themselves to be studying ordinary oral language, whereas, Olson insists, they are primarily studying the properties of written language, a view shared by linguists Roy Harris (2009) and Per Linell (2005). Olson introduced this shifted perspective on language by providing a historical context in his widely anthologized 1977 article, "From utterance to text: The bias of language in speech and writing," published in the Harvard Educational Review. He vastly expanded the theory into the book ‘’The World on Paper: The Conceptual and Cognitive Implications of Writing and Reading" (CUP, 2004).

Olson was long concerned with the implications of the advances in psychological theory for educational theory and practice an interest sponsored by Jerome Bruner's 1960 book, "The Process of Education" Olson examined the implications of the so-called "cognitive revolution" of the 1960s, a revolution led by the work of Noam Chomsky, Jerome Bruner, George Miller, Roger Brown, and others in a book entitled ‘’Jerome Bruner: The Cognitive Revolution in Educational Theory." (Continuum, 2007) He advanced a more general examination of the role of psychological research in educational theory in "Psychological Theory and Educational Reform: How School Remakes Mind and Society," (CUP, 2003) a book that linked his research on literacy and theory of mind with the school's role in intellectual and social development. He concluded that educational theory was better seen as a moral theory centered on agency and responsibility, rather than a purely cognitive one centered on knowledge.

Olson was born in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, and was raised by his grandparents until the age of 6, as his mother had contracted tuberculosis. He attended the University of Saskatchewan from 1953–55, obtained a teaching certificate; he then taught in a village school in Alsask, Saskatchewan. He returned to the University of Saskatchewan, where he graduated with a B.Ed. in 1960. He went on to earn a Ph.D. from the University of Alberta in 1963. He worked briefly at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and was worked as a fellow under the supervision of Jerome Bruner, at Harvard University's Center for Cognitive Studies

David Richard Olson (born June 16, 1935) is a Canadian cognitive developmental psychologist who has studied the development of language, literacy, and cognition, particularly the mental lives of children, their understanding of language and mind and the psychology of teaching. Olson is University Professor Emeritus at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, where he has taught since 1966.