Scott Johnson - Lab Director

scott.johnson@ucla.edu

Dr. Johnson received his PhD in 1992 from Arizona State University, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship in the Center for Visual Science at Rochester. Prior to his current position at UCLA, he was an Associate Professor at NYU and an Assistant Professor at Cornell. His first job was as a Lecturer at Lancaster University, UK, where he is now a Visiting Research Fellow. His research concerns the origins and development of perception and cognition in humans, with a focus on attention, speech perception, face perception, object knowledge, learning mechanisms, brain development, and developmental disabilities.

Laura Hawkins - Lab Manager

lhawk@ucla.edu

Laura originally joined the UCLA Baby Lab in 2008 as a research assistant. She worked on several different projects in the lab, focusing her work on ERP studies, until her graduation in June 2010. Upon graduation, she was hired as a Lab Coordinator for Dr. Karen Dobkins' Infant Vision lab at UC San Diego. During her two years there, she worked on a longitudinal project aimed at understanding the origins of Autism Spectrum Disorder where she was primarily in charge of ERP data collection and analysis. She rejoined the lab in January of 2013 as the Lab Manager and is hoping to gain even more research experience.

Bryan Nguyen - Lab Technician

bnguyen07@ucla.edu

Bryan originally started out as a research assistant here at the lab in January 2011 and after graduating from UCLA with a B.S. in Cognitive Science, he became the full-time lab technician. As a research assistant, he helped create study stimuli and wrote programs to sort/analyze data. Now, he is looking to take what he learned during his undergraduate studies to explore infant object perception and how joint attention affects the learning of word associations.

Paola Escudero - Visiting Researcher

Escudero@uva.nl

Paola received her PhD in 2005 from Utrecht University, The Netherlands. She is a Senior Researcher at the University of Amsterdam. Since January 2009, she is Visiting Assistant Professor at the department of Spanish and Portuguese at UCLA and Visiting Researcher at the Babylab. Her main research line focuses on phonetic, phonological and lexical development in L1, L2, bilingual and multilingual populations, as well as in adults and children with cochlear implants. She also investigates visual and auditory/linguistic categorization in young infants in the UCLA Baby Lab, and speech perception in animals (zebra vinches and budgerigars) and humans (infants and adults) with biologists from Leiden University, The Netherlands.

HoJin Kim - Graduate Student

hojinkim@ucla.edu

Jin received his BS in Spring 2007 from Virginia Tech with a major in Psychology and a minor in Biology. He is currently a fifth-year PhD student studying in the Developmental Psychology program here at UCLA. He is interested in cognitive development in infants, specifically face perception, language, memory, sleep patterns, and visual perception more broadly. In addition he also plans to study infant brain development as a means to examine the basic brain-behavior links used in the early years of life to learn about the world.

Lauren Burakowski - Graduate Student

lburakowski@ucla.edu

Lauren is a fourth-year graduate student from Rochester, NY. She graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with a B.S. in Psychology in May 2009. Her primary research interests are the development of inhibition from infancy to adolescence, and attention. Her previous work was with preschool-aged children. She uses eye tracking and ERP techniques to investigate visual attention in infants.

Lauren Krogh - Graduate Student

laurenkrogh@gmail.com

Lauren received her B.S. in Biological Sciences and Psychology from CarnegieMellon University in May 2009. She is currently a fourth-year PhD student in the Developmental Psychology program at UCLA. Her research interest is infants' cognitive and perceptual development. Prior to coming to UCLA, Lauren'sresearch focused on animacy, categorization, and causal perception. At UCLA her research focuses on her interest in how developing motor abilities affect cognitive and perceptual development.

Elizabeth Goldenberg - Graduate Student

ergoldenb@ucla.edu

Elizabeth received her B.A. in Psychology in 2010 from UC Santa Cruz. She is currently a third year doctoral student in Developmental Psychology at UCLA. She is interested in understanding the mechanisms that underlie infants' and toddlers' learning and memory abilities. Her research in the Baby Lab focuses on how infants learn object labels in the face of changing context. She uses eye-tracking methodology to understand how children’s visual attention supports learning and memory.

Christina Schonberg - Graduate Student

christina.schonberg@gmail.com

Christina Schonberg is a first-year Ph.D. student in the Developmental Psychology program at UCLA. She graduated in 2011 from Northwestern University with a B.A. in Psychology. Her research interests include language and cognitive development in young children, with a focus on the effects of being monolingual or bi-/multilingual. In the Baby Lab, Christina is investigating the role that language exposure plays in infants' cognitive and perceptual development.

Amanda Fisch - Undergraduate Student

amandabeth@ucla.edu

Amanda is a fourth-year undergraduate student at UCLA studying psychology. She is interested in all areas of infant cognitive development, and plans to attend graduate school next fall. Her current work in the lab investigates the nature and limits of visual statistical learning in infants and adults.

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Scott Johnson