My research primarily focuses on developing or adapting cognitive neuroscience methods to answer questions about how social cognition (how we think about people and non-animate entities) and perception (the information we get directly from our senses) interact to form our understanding of the world. I have focused on development because it's a great way to look at how this balance changes, and because developmental research poses a lot of interesting methodological challenges, such as how you can get an infant to "tell" you how she thinks about the world. Thinking about problems from this angle can also help get answers from adults, who sometimes have trouble clearly expressing what they see (for example, it's not too easy to verbally describe a sunset in the same detail with which you can visualize it). Much of my current research applies these methods to learn more about parent-child relationships, and healthy child development in both typical and atypical families and environments (e.g., deaf and hard-of-hearing families, children with Autism Spectrum Disorders and their families, and high-risk foster youth).
At the Infant Vision Lab (PI: Dr. Karen Dobkins), most of our research focused on the nature vs. nurture problem: that is, how much of our behavior and understanding of the world is driven by our genetic-makeup and "preprogrammed" development versus our experiences out in the world and what we learn from other people. To answer these questions, I have adapted classic psychophysical methods (primarily based on either voluntary or automatic eye movements) and electrophysiological methods (EEG, which records electrical activity in the brain that is contingent on doing certain activities or thinking certain thoughts).
Development of visual motion perception
Blumenthal, E. J., Bosworth, R. G., & Dobkins, K. R. (2013). Fast development of global motion processing in human infants. Journal of Vision, 13, 1-13.
Wickramasinghe, I. A., Blumenthal, E. J. & Dobkins, K. R. (2013, May). Stimulus visibility and motion coherence sensitivity in early infancy. Poster presented at the Symposium on Cognitive and Language Development, Irvine, CA.
Neural habituation to repeated presentations of visual and auditory stimuli (developing a paradigm to measure how the brain "sensitizes" to familiar pictures and sounds)
Blumenthal, E. J., Garcia, J. O., Carver, L. J., Serences, J. T., & Dobkins, K. R. (in prep). A new technique to measure neural habituation to visual and auditory stimuli using event-related potentials.
Blumenthal, E. J., Garcia, J. O., Williams, D. R., Carver, L. J., Serences, J. T., & Dobkins, K. R. (2013, November). Neurological measures of sensory habituation in typically developing adults and infants using an event-related potential technique. Poster to be presented at the Society for Neuroscience conference, San Diego, CA. Poster also to be presented at the 17th EEGLAB Workshop (2013, November) in San Diego, CA. [download the poster]
Williams, D. R., Blumenthal, E. J., Garcia, J. O., Serences, J. T., Carver, L. J., & Dobkins, K. R. (2013, May). Sensory habituation measures using ERP in adults and infants. Poster presented at the Symposium on Cognitive and Language Development, Irvine, CA. [download the poster]
Visual sensitivity in cluttered ("noisy") environments
Khalid, M., van Etten, H., Blumenthal, E. J., Dobkins, K. R. (2013, May). The development of visual sensitivity in noisy visual environments in adults and infants. Poster presented at the UC Berkeley Interdisciplinary Research Conference, Berkeley, CA. [download the poster]
Early detection of Autism Spectrum Disorders in at-risk children
Blumenthal, E.J., Dobkins, K. R., Price, E., McIntire, M., & Appelbaum, M. I. (in prep). A longitudinal study of risk factors for Autism Spectrum Development in high risk baby sibs.
Visual development in twins
Blumenthal, E.J., Bosworth, R. G., & Dobkins, K. R. (2012, May). Genetic and environmental contributions to chromatic and luminance sensitivity in infant twins. Poster presented at the Vision Sciences Society Meeting. Naples, FL. [download the poster]
Blumenthal, E.J., Bosworth, R. G., & Dobkins, K. R. (2012, May). Individual differences in chromatic and luminance contrast sensitivity in infant twins. Invited talk at the Vision Sciences Society Meeting. Naples, FL.
My graduate at the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences at the University of Washington and my undergraduate training at the Causality and Mind Lab at Brown University was focused on causality, or cause-and-effect relationships. This is an important area for research, since much of our ability to make sense of the dynamic physical world relies on an understanding of the causal relations between moving objects. This allows us to predict the outcome of object interactions, to influence change on events, and ultimately, to plan our own goal-directed actions. My dissertation research was on causal perception (how we directly "perceive" or infer causality from watching an event), and my other projects explored causal reasoning (how we decide whether an event is related based on cause-and-effect) in a variety of contexts. Below is more information about some of these projects.
Causal perception of collision events (for example, when one ball hits another and the second one moves)
Blumenthal, E.J., & Sommerville, J.A. (in prep). Categorical representations of perceptual causality.
Blumenthal, E. J., Sommerville, J. A., & Gorn, A. V. (2011, April). Categorical representation of physical causation: An event-related potential study. Paper presented at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society Meeting. San Francisco, CA.
Understanding causality in goal-directed actions
Blumenthal, E. J., & Sommerville, J. A. (2010, November). Human causal perception: An event-related potential study. Poster presented at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting. San Diego, CA.
Sommerville, J. A., Blumenthal, E. J., Venema, K. & Braun, K. (2010). The body in action: The impact of self-produced action on infants’ action perception and understanding. In V. Slaughter & C. Brownwell (Eds). Early Development of Body Representations. Cambridge University Press.
Blumenthal, E. J., Yun, J. E., & Sommerville, J. A. (2010, March). Limitations of 8-month-olds' ability to generalize goals. Poster presented at the biennial meeting of the International Conference on Infant Studies, Baltimore, MD.
Blumenthal, E. J., Yun, J. E., & Sommerville, J. A. (2009, October). Infants’ generalization of an actor’s goals across the first year of life. Paper presented at the biennial meeting of the Cognitive Development Society conference, San Antonio, TX.
Blumenthal, E. J., & Sommerville, J. A. (2009, April). From transient goals to enduring preferences: the development of understanding goal-directed action in infancy. Symposium presentation at the Society for Research on Child Development biennial meeting, Denver, CO.
Causal reasoning and "effect monitoring": Inferring (hidden) causes from observed effects
Sobel, D. M., Yoachim, C. M., Gopnik, A., Meltzoff, A. N., & Blumenthal, E. J. (2007). The blicket within: Preschoolers’ inferences about insides and causes. Journal of Cognition and Development, 8, 159-182. [link to the article]
Meltzoff, A. N., & Blumenthal, E. J. (2007, March). Causal understanding and ‘effect monitoring’ in infants. Invited talk at the James S. McDonnell Foundation on Causal Understanding workshop, University of Washington, Seattle, WA.
Meltzoff, A. N., & Blumenthal, E. J. (2006, April). Causal monitoring by infants. Invited talk at the James S. McDonnell Foundation on Causal Understanding workshop, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA.
Sobel, D. M., Sommerville, J. A., Blumenthal, E. J., & Ventura, L. (2009, April). Preschoolers use others’ beliefs to make causal inferences from probabilistic data. Poster presented at the Society for Research on Child Development biennial meeting, Denver, CO.
Sobel, D. M., & Blumenthal, E. J. (2005, October). Children’s developing knowledge of causal and internal properties. Poster presented at the 2005 biennial meeting of the Cognitive Development Society, San Diego, CA.
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Postdoctoral Scholar, Department of Psychology, University of California San Diego, PI: Karen Dobkins, Ph.D. (2011-present) [click here to go to the Mind, Experience, and Perception Lab's website]
Graduate Researcher, Department of Psychology and Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences, University of Washington, PI: Jessica Sommerville, Ph.D. (2007-2009) [click here to go to the ECCL's website]
Graduate Researcher, Department of Psychology and Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences, University of Washington, PI: Andrew Meltzoff, Ph.D. (2005-2007) [click here to go to I-LABS' website]
Lab Manager, Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences, Brown University, PI: David Sobel, Ph.D. (2001-2005) [click here to go to the CML's website]
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