Principal Investigator
Linda B. Smith, PhD. Chancellor's Professor
2013 Recipient of the David E. Rumelhart Prize
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: What do people see and say in their everyday lives? Does this change with age, and does it influence what people pay attention to and learn? I study how the natural statistics of input matter for language and cognition. In adults, I examine how patterns in language influence eyewitness memory and blame attribution. In children, I study how patterns in early visual experience guide developing object knowledge. Currently, I focus on how infants and children learn from instances distributed over time, using head-camera recordings in the home and behavioral methods in the lab.
Swapnaa Jayaraman, Postdoctoral Fellow
Research Interests: Development is all about change: macro changes like motor milestones and micro changes like neural organization, connectivity and growth. When and how do these changes occur? What are the mechanisms behind these changes? What factors affect these changes? These are questions that developmental scientists are trying to answer in small and large ways. I am particularly interested in how infants perceive, process, and understand faces, and how age, experience, and the environment affect these processes. I take both neurological as well as behavioral approaches to answering these questions.
Megumi Kuwabara, Postdoctoral Fellow
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.
Umay Suanda, Postdoctoral Fellow
Research Interests: My research interests are in the broad area of children's language acquisition with a focus on children's word learning. What are the mechanisms that underlie children's word learning? How do these processes evolve and change over development? What accounts for the individual differences we see in vocabulary acquisition? My current research in the Cognitive Development Lab focuses on the nature of the perceptual, social, and linguistic input parents provide to children at different ages, and how this input helps shape the learning processes involved in children's word learning.
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.
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
Dan Yurovsky, Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Psychology, Stanford University, California
Jennifer Zapf, Assistant Professor,
Human Development & Psychology, University of Wisconsin at Green Bay
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