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We live in a very busy and noisy world, which, due to our own and others’ movements, is in virtually constant motion. How do we make sense of it all? How do we manage to keep track of where others are, what they are doing, and why they are doing what they are doing? How do we individuate, enumerate, locate, and identify the objects that surround us? How do our abilities to do these things develop? My research is guided by these overarching questions, with a focus on the intersection of perceptual and cognitive development. My primary goal is to characterize how we gather information from our surrounding, oftentimes social, context, how these percepts are contrasted with preexisting representations to form expectations that guide actions, and how these processes change with age and experience. Here is a page listing my papers. Collaboration plays a huge role in all of the research that I do, and I have had a wonderful opportunity to work with many fantastic colleagues featured on my collaborators page.
Infants' Action Perception
One of my lines of work examines how infants make sense of their surroundings, and in particular, how they perceive and represent others, and interpret others' actions. Another thread of this research examines infant's abilities to predict object motion events. This research makes use of basic experimental tasks, as well as looking time and eye-tracking methodologies.
Children's Proportional Reasoning
Reasoning about proportional relations is essential in math, science, and many forms of everyday problem-solving. Another branch of my work examines how elementary school aged children reason about these sorts of relations, and the perceptual factors that bear on their abilities to solve proportion problems. For instance, some of my work examines how children's reasoning differs for continuous and discrete quantities, and the scalar relations between proportions.
Child and Adolescent Decision-Making Processes and Risk-Taking Tendencies
Behavioral decision-making theories suggest that people weigh the probabilities and values associated with the various outcomes associated with various choice alternatives when making decisions. My work has looked at how children and adolescents weight probabilities and values, and how sensitive they are to each in decision-making contexts. How this translates into the engagement in or avoidance of risky behaviors is another of my interests.
Child and Adolescent Decision-Making Processes and Risk-Taking Tendencies
How people are able to observe, interpret, and replicate the actions they observe others engage in is interesting in terms of its contribution to social interactions, and can be a strong contributor to learning and development. It is, however, unclear how it is that people are able to imitate one another. Some of my work has examined the mental processes that contribute to action perception and imitation.
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