My research focuses on the development of social and visual
cognition in humans. Specifically, my students and I are
addressing the following questions from a developmental
perspective: - What is the nature of the information that
infants and children encode about humans and objects? - How do
they organize this information to compute meaningful
representations of people, objects, and events? - How do memory
and other cognitive processes, such as expectancy, develop to
enable the functional use of this information? I also
collaborate with Professor Jane Joseph of the Medical University
of South Carolina to study brain development in typically
developing children and those with Autism Spectrum Disorder
(ASD). 1. One set of studies is examining the nature of the
information that infants use to process faces and how that
differs with age. Other face studies that we are conducting are
looking into the question of expertise. As adults, we are
experts at detecting and attending to socially significant
information in