Current Research Projects
The overarching goal of the research in the Brain, Cognition and Development Lab is to better understand how experience influences learning from infancy into childhood and when adults become perceptual experts. We use behavioral measures, eye-tracking methods, and measures of brain activity (EEG, event-related potentials (ERPs), and steady-state visual evoked potentials (ssVEPs), and we have recently begun using MRI with infants. We collaborate with researchers locally, nationally, and internationally. Our work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the US Army Research Institute for Behavioral and Social Sciences.
How does the early visual system develop and is it important for later cognitive development?
This project, funded by the National Eye Institute, examines whether the development of the visual brain plays a foundational role in later cognitive development. We will follow infants from 6 to 18 months of age using a battery of vision, eye-tracking, and EEG measures. We pair this battery with Bayesian hierarchical models and machine learning to identify reliable predictors of later cognitive development. Our goal is to establish a reliable index of healthy visual development.
How does the world shape what infants see and learn?
Infants learn from the words caregivers use. For example, when parents give different dogs individual names, like “Oliver” and “Suzie,” infants attend to the details that tell the dogs apart. When every dog is just named “dog,” infants focus on what dogs have in common. This changes both attention and brain responses, and the effects can still be seen years later. We study this learning in the lab and during everyday parent-infant shared book reading. We have learned that what caregivers say to infants at different ages supports infant learning and brain development in important ways.
How do infants and young children learn to identify and recognize familiar and unfamiliar people?
Face recognition is thought to be universal, an expert perceptual Face recognition allows us to effortlessly identify individual people, emotions, and intentions. Our work shows that this expertise is shaped by experience during infancy. Young infants can tell apart faces from many groups, including other species and other races. By 9 months of age, infants become better at telling apart faces from the groups they see most often, a process called “perceptual narrowing.” We have shown that individual-level labeling is an important contributor to this process: when infants learn names for individual faces, they are able to continue to tell those faces apart from others. This early learning affects both behavior and brain responses. Perceptual narrowing also influences other aspects of face processing. It affects how infants match emotional faces with emotional voices, and how they follow eye gaze to learn about objects.
What measures can we use to study infants who cannot yet talk or respond to us reliably?
Studying infant brain and behavior requires measures that are both sensitive to learning and reliable across individual infants and ages. Our lab combines methods that are rarely used together in infant research. This lets us link developmental experiences with what infants look at, what they learn, how they behave, and how their brains respond. A central goal of our work is to identify and validate such measures and provide useful tools, stimulus sets, and guides for the developmental science community.
What strategies and visual features do adults use when they become experts?
A novice views a little brown creature with two legs and feathers and identifies it simply as a “bird,” whereas a veteran birdwatcher knows in an instant that it is a “white-crowned sparrow.” Becoming an expert as an adult is very similar to how we learn about people and objects during infancy. Perceptual experts make decisions based on visual information available to them. In some professional fields, like radiology, these decisions are important and impact people’s lives. Our work has identified the visual characteristics and perceptual strategies that real-world and laboratory-trained experts bring to bear when recognizing objects within their domain of specialization.