Our General Interests
Our research examines the early foundations of conceptual thought. Our studies use basic behavioral methods (such as looking, reaching, and crawling preferences) to investigate what infants understand about objects and people. We are particularly interested in how infants' early expectations about their physical and social world relate to rudimentary notions of identity, number, and socio-moral judgement. You can read examples of some of our research projects below.
Do infants judge a book by it's cover?
We are looking at when infants, like adults, automatically infer the behavior of others based upon appearance (e.g., how others look and sound).
Sounds & Shape?
One series of projects investigates whether infants expect a character to act one way or another dependng on the shape and sound properties they exhbit.
Faces?
We are investigating when infants and children develop a bias to make decisions about a person's personality based upon facial appearance. Using a variety of methods we are testing whether infants use facial features to infer social traits like how trustworthy or powerful a character might be.
Is it what's on the 'insides' that counts?
Even though looks can be very important, older children and adults know that a person's behavior is caused by properties that lie beneath the surface. We are investigating whether infants' early understanding of living things begins with a rudimentary bias towards internal properties.
keeping track of who is who?
We are investigating whether infants are more likely to represent who an agent is from one moment to the next based upon their 'insides' versus how the character looks on the outside.
others' goals?
We are exploring the properties that infants believe are most important when representing the goals and preferences of other people. Is a person's preference for one object over another based upon what that object is like on its 'insides' or rather how it appears on the surface?
social/moral behavior?
We are testing whether infants believe that an agent’s socio-moral behavior is more closely connected to its ‘insides’ than how it appears on the surface. Do infants attribute a character’s helpful or unhelpful actions to features that appear to be inside that character (e.g., the color of some material in the puppet’s belly) versus features that appear to be external (e.g., the color of some material on the character’s head)
Number & Individual Identity
We are exploring what information infants use to figure out how many individuals exist in a scene. Because objects and people frequently move in and out of view, infants must possess some guidelines for representing individuals as the same things from one moment to the next. Our lab is exploring several possible types of information that infants might use to decide whether something is the same or a different thing than what they saw before.
spatial continuity?
We have demonstrated that the specifc ways in which objects disappear behind occluding surfaces determines whether infants can successfully track a stable number of individuals in a scene. Only objects that disappear in a spatially continuous and ecologically valid manner are succesfully tracked.
cohesive movement?
Our research has explored whether the ability to track an indiivudal over time is faciliatated by cohesive motion. Even the simplest non-cohesive movement seems to disrupt infants' representation of the number of crackers involved.
social/moral behavior?
We are examining whether infants will use a character’s social/moral behavior towards another as the basis for representing it as a unique individual. For instance, if infants see a small puppet engage in a helpful behavior with another individual (and then return behind an opaque screen) and moments later see an identical looking puppet engage in an unhelpful behavior with that same individual, will they be inclined to believe there are one or two characters?
