Principal Investigator
Linda
B. Smith, PhD. Chancellor's Professor, Department
Chair
Research Interests: Perceptual and cognitive development in early childhood; classification and categorization; interactions between perception and language
Researchers
Char Wozniak, Lab Manager/Research Coordinator
Research Interests: Children are born curious, kind of like scientists, with a desire to explore their world. They spontaneously experiment - they smell, taste, bite, coo, cry, giggle, blow, hum and touch - they shake, punch, squeeze, push, crush, rub and try to pull things apart. I am intensely interested in observing children and learning about how they learn.
Jennifer Richler, Research Scientist
Research Interests: My research focuses on cognitive processes in children with autism spectrum disorders. In particular, I am interested in how young children with ASD differ from typically developing children in the way they learn about and see the world, such as how they explore objects.
Richard Prather, Postdoctoral Fellow
Research Interests: I study how young children learn about number concepts. How do children's initial experiences with the number system affect later development? What effect does children's understanding of magnitude in general have on their concept of number?
Caitlin Fausey, Postdoctoral Fellow
Research Interests: When we see an event, what do we learn from it? What do we remember? Adults who speak different languages often talk about the same event in different ways. Sometimes, they also remember different things about the same event. How does the language we use influence what we pay attention to and remember? To fully answer this question, we must understand how children simultaneously learn about the language, actions and objects in their world. In my research, I examine the role of language in developing habits of attending and remembering.
Megumi Kuwabara, Graduate Student
Research Interests: Researchers have been finding that adults from different cultures (e.g. people from U.S. and people from Japan) see things in the world in different ways. I am interested in finding out how, why and when these differences develop in young children.
Sandra Street, Graduate Student
Research Interests: I am interested the development of visually guided action. Properties of objects must be used in conjunction with motor control and spatiotemporal information in order to produce smooth, object-centered actions. My interest is in how the underlying cognitive and neural mechanisms develop and become integrated in infancy and early childhood.
Lisa Cantrell, Graduate Student
Research Interests: What do young children and infants know about quantity? Can they tell the difference between 2 and 3 apples? What kind of information do they use to know the difference? Number? Total mass? And does learning language change how well they discriminate these amounts? In my research I am interested in the visual cues young infants and children use in comparing quantities and how this might vary across cultures and languages and change over time.
Viridiana Benitez, Graduate Student
Research Interests: How do humans learn to attend and pick out relevant information among the vast amount of input they continuously receive? My research focuses on investigating the interaction between attention and learning in the context of language acquisition. I examine this question both in monolingual infants that are beginning to say their first words, and in bilingual children and adults whose language environment has shaped the way they allocate their attention.
Dan Yurovsky, Graduate Student
Research Interests: Learning a language involves solving a number of difficult problems - understanding when others are trying to communicate, segmenting individual words from continuous speech, and mapping these words onto their referents (among others). I work to understand how children develop solutions to these problems by modeling language acquisition across multiple timescales: from the moment-by-moment scale of eye-movements to the month and year scale of development.
Catarina Vales, Graduate Student
Research Interests: Everyday learning takes place in a real environment that offers many potential targets for attention and learning, as well as changing momentary goals. How does the child select and stabilize attention for word learning? What role does word learning itself play in organizing a child's attention? My main goal is to study the developmental changes in attention to further investigate the role of the attentional processes in word learning, including object labels and adjectives.
Lisa Byrge, Graduate Student
Research Interests: How do children develop fluency in formal symbol systems, particularly Arabic numerals? What cognitive/perceptual/motor processes are involved? How does developing understanding of the number system interact with developing acquisition of other symbol systems (such as reading)? How does early experience with symbol systems shape later use of these symbols and later mathematical cognition generally? I am interested of the acquisition of adult-like fluency with symbols and the "downstream" effects of this acquisition process.
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Collaborators
Susan Jones, Indiana University
Chen Yu, Indiana University
Karin James, Indiana University
Michael Gasser, Indiana University
Kelly Mix, Michigan State University
Cynthia Breazeal, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
John Spencer, University of Iowa
Thea Ionescu, Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania
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Former Students
Eliana Colunga, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Colorado at Boulder
Leonidas Doumas, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Hawaii
Lisa Gershkoff-Stowe, Associate Professor of Speech and Hearing Sciences, Indiana University
Rima Hanania, Researcher, Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University
Shohei Hidaka, Assistant Professor, School of Knowledge Science, Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
Thomas Hills, Associate Professor, Psychology, University of Warwick, United Kingdom
Steve Hockema, Senior Scientist and Partner, Aji, LLC
Hye-Won Hong, Professor, Psychology Department, California State University
Donald Katz, Assistant Professor, Dept. of Psychology and Volen Center for Complex Systems, Brandeis University
Alan Kersten, Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, Florida Atlantic University
Josita Maouene, Assistant Professor, Psychology Department, Grand Valley State University
Teresa Mitchell, Assistant Professor, Eunice Kennedy Shriver Center, University of Massachusetts Medical School
Alfredo Pereira, Postdoctoral Fellow, Computational Intelligence Research Group, Center of Technology and Systems, Portugal
Brigette Ryalls, Associate Professor, Psycholgy Department, University of Nebraska at Omaha
Larissa Samuelson, Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Iowa
Catherine Sandhofer, Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles
Maria Sera, Professor, Institute of Child Development, University of Minnesota
Nitya Sethuraman, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Michigan
Adam Sheya, Visiting Faculty, Psychological and Brian Sciences, Indiana University
Ji Son, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, California State University, Los Angeles
Amanda Walley, Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Alabama at Birmingham
Hanako Yoshida, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Houston
Jennifer Zapf, Assistant Professor,
Human Development & Psychology, University of Wisconsin at Green Bay
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