Overview

Our research focuses on the origins of knowledge in humans. The past several decades have witnessed a blossoming in research on perceptual and cognitive development in infancy, and a view has emerged that infants take in far more information, and are more aware of their surroundings, than we often give them credit for. Advances in methods for tapping infant perception and knowledge provide compelling evidence that by the end of the first year after birth, infants seem to know many of the basics of the world around them: Objects tend to behave in certain ways (e.g., they persist when they are occluded), people interact with each other using language and gesture, and moving around and handling objects are good ways of obtaining more knowledge. Despite these advances, fundamental questions remain concerning how this state of knowledge comes to be. Our lab explores these questions with preferential looking and eye tracking paradigms, as well as connectionist modeling of developmental phenomena. Because the focus is on origins, we are less interested in participating in traditional “nature-nurture” debates (though we do it anyway) than in understanding and elucidating precise developmental mechanisms, no matter what they might be: endogenous prenatal or postnatal organization, the role of experience in shaping responses to recurring patterns, contributions of perceptual (i.e., low-level) skills to cognitive (i.e., high-level) functions, and so on. The question of origins of knowledge, then, lies at the intersection of developmental psychology, vision science, cognitive science, and developmental neurobiology. Our general view could be expressed as: Many “smart” mechanisms emerge from simple mechanisms, given the right environment. Infants are born equipped with rudimentary perceptual and learning skills and a handful of reflexes, but there is little evidence that anything resembling “knowledge” is available to neonates, beyond the ability to acquire information quickly and retain it over short intervals. Within several months, however, the situation is radically different. How are these changes best characterized? The goal of our research in exploring this question is first, to describe age-related changes in visual perception and early learning abilities, and then to explain the mechanisms that are responsible for these changes. To do this, we try to distill a question to its fundamental essence, see how and when infants respond to the simplest possible version of a cognitive challenge, and from there, develop new theory. We devote a lot of time and energy to the development of new methodological advances, such as the use of computer-controlled experiments and stimuli, and in recording eye movements in infants. Computer-controlled experiments give us precise management of stimulus generation and presentation. Recording eye movements is technically challenging but the resulting data are incomparable in their precision, and, I believe, bring us as closely as possible to what infants are thinking. We also use imaging techniques (functional magnetic resonance imaging with adults, electroencephalography with infants) in studies that explore cortical correlates of perception and learning, and computational models of perception. Evidence from our lab strongly suggests that much of the development of infant cognition can be explained with some simple learning mechanisms (e.g., associative learning), a time to observe the world, the ability to direct attention via eye movements, and the rapid pace of brain development known to occur from the initial formation of neurons (early in pregnancy) extending through the second year after birth.