Whether identifying threats or categorizing objects, humans make sense of visual information quickly and without extensive experience. My research seeks to understand the cognitive and neural mechanisms that support visual perception from infancy to adulthood.  To this end, I use a combination of approaches from developmental psychology as well as cognitive computational neuroscience.

I am currently a joint MindCORE and Data Driven Discovery Initiative (DDDI) fellow at the University of Pennsylvania with Dr. Michael Arcaro. Previously I was a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Marlene Behrmann's at Carnegie Mellon University. I did my PhD with Dr. Stella Lourenco. I also frequently collaborate with the Dilks lab. As an undergrad, I studied the development of spatial thinking with Dr. Nora Newcombe in the Temple Infant and Child lab.

Currently, I am exploring how brain areas outside the ventral pathway may critical computations for object recognition, and examining what kinds of early developing mechanisms scaffold object recognition development. In graduate school I laid the foundation for this work by using a combination of behavioral, computational, and neuroimaging methods to examine whether human vision incorporates a skeletal description of shape for object recognition. We found that even infants rely on a shape skeleton to categorize objects. I have also worked on questions relating to threat, navigation, and magnitude perception.