Understanding the connection between relationships and emotions.
Most emotion understanding work has focused on reasoning about how someone will feel about their own experiences, but emotions that we express toward other people and their experiences are a rich source of information about the social world. In this research, we ask how infants and children use emotions reason about other people and their relationships.
Connecting others’ emotions and their representations of the world.
Emotions are not automatic consequences of particular experiences; they are the result of the appraisals and desires of the person experiencing them. Not everyone reacts positively to a particular team scoring a goal, for example. In this line of research, we ask how children use emotions as information about other people’s representations of the world.
Domain-specificity vs. domain-generality in infant cognition.
Decades of infant research have used looking-time paradigms to provide insight into infants’ understanding of the world around them. I ask how infants’ looking to surprising or new information reflects individual differences in cognition and explore analytical approaches to understanding their behavior.
What infants look at.
Infants watch animated videos or recordings of people interacting with each other or objects. We use infants’ looking at these videos to measure their learning, expectations, and beliefs about the world. We conduct these studies in-person and online over Zoom.
What children say and think.
With older, verbal children, we often ask them to tell us what they think. For example, in some studies we tell them short stories and ask them to make a prediction, inference, or evaluation based on those stories.
What Infants and children Do.
With both infants and children, we study what they do. For example, we might measure how they search or explore things, who they learn a word from, or which reward they choose.