The goal of my research program is to understand the
mechanisms that underlie the development of social perception. Specifically, my
research combines behavioural and electrophysiological (event-related potentials
– ERPs) methods to investigate the psychological and neural underpinnings of
various aspects of face perception from infancy to adulthood. Deciphering
information from faces is crucial to social functioning, and most adults decode
facial information quickly and effortlessly. However, the development of this
expertise is protracted, and it is unclear what is changing across
development and how, mechanistically, these changes come about.
I am particularly interested in the role
that early experiences play in driving developmental change. MethodologyA cornerstone of my research program is the use of multiple methods. I combine a variety of behavioural methods with tools from cognitive neuroscience to study face perception in infants, children and adults. Behaviour With infants, I use measures of looking time to understand the development of face recognition, emotion perception, and category learning. In habituation and familiarization studies, infants are familiarized with a particular stimulus, or set of stimuli, for a certain amount of time or until they reach a set criterion. Their looking times to familiar vs. novel stimuli are then compared to assess their discrimination, recognition and categorization abilities. With children, I use simple computer tasks to measure accuracy and reaction time on various face perception tasks.  In ongoing research at the Museum
of Science in Boston, Dr. Ben Balas and I are investigating
the strategies that children use to recognize own- versus other-species faces.
In the behavioural task pictured above, children decide which of two
symmetrical faces (at bottom) is most similar to the original face (at top).
This simple task allows us to investigate the development of the “left-side
bias” – a hallmark of expert face processing in adults. Event-related potentials (ERPs) With infants, children and adults, I use ERPs to gain insight into the underlying neural processes that subserve various aspects of face perception and how they change throughout development. ERPs are a non-invasive measure of the brain's electrical activity and are therefore appropriate for use with infants and young children. ERPs have high temporal resolution (on the order of milliseconds), so neural processes can be tracked on a moment-by-moment basis as they are occurring. Watch Maja (a graduate research assistant) and I net a 7-month-old baby for an ERP session. |   |