research

Recent Publications

Current Studies

Please take a look at our 2012 newsletter for additional study information.

We are currently conducting several studies examining how infants perceive themselves and other objects, interpret other people’s actions, and understand language. Some of our ongoing studies include:

Understanding Measurement

In preschool and early elementary, measurement instruction primarily focuses on measuring length. However, children often have difficulty understanding the concept of units of measurement. Several of our studies examine how children learn to estimate the length and size of objects, learn to use a ruler, and understand the concept of units. We also develop training techniques that help children learn about units based on the findings of these studies.

Improving Spatial Reasoning (Cross-Sectioning and Mental Rotation)

Several of our studies examine particular spatial skills and how to improve them in preschool and early elementary students. For example, imagine what an apple would look like after it is cut in half. Is the flat, cut-side (e.g., cross-section) the same shape as the whole apple? Depending on the angle of the cut, the resulting cross-section may look vastly different than the overall shape of the apple. Additionally, the ability to mentally rotate objects and understand if they are the same or different from other objects requires complex spatial visualization. These types of skills (cross-sectioning, mental rotation) are critical for later achievement in math and the sciences. In our research, we address how spatial ability develops and how it can be improved in young children.

Influence of Environmental Cues

This study seeks to examine toddlers’ use of environmental information in order to locate hidden objects. We also look at how specific environmental cues (like shape, color, size) can be manipulated in order to affect performance.

Early Math Concepts in Infants

In the past 10 years, research has suggested that infants know a lot about number, but it is not clear whether it is really number or the amount of area that infants are sensitive

to. Our research seeks to learn more about what 7 to 8 month-old infants know and understand about quantity.

Language and Social Reasoning

In our research, we explore the way infants and children reason about social categories such as gender, race, and language. We are especially interested in children’s attention to the language and accent with which others speak in guiding their early social preferences. Current studies are investigating the impact of language and accent on children’s memory for, reasoning about, and social preferences towards novel individuals that they encounter.

Gesture Effects on Number

The purpose of our Gesture Study is to examine the role that pointing gestures play in children's understanding of number. We are specifically interested in how the presence of pointing gesture in young children, who have a limited verbal understanding of number, may influence the understanding of number in nonverbal number tasks. We are studying “pointing gestures” in very young children because research has shown that pointing gesture enhances children's numerical ability (e.g. counting, simple numerical problems), but has not focused on very young children who have a difficulty in verbal understanding of number.

Early Language Development

How do infants learn language? We address this question by observing children as they transition from producing single words to combining words into multi-word utterances. Our aim is to better understand the role of different kinds of talk in children’s early language development.

Visual Habituation Studies

Studies that record how long babies look at events are based on a simple premise true for both babies and adults—if you see an event numerous times, your interest in it will decline. This is called habituation. When a new event is seen, your interest level will increase. This is called dishabituation. We show babies the same event happening over and over again. Once they habituate to the event, as measured by their decreased looking time, we make changes to the original event. Because we know that infants will look longer at an event which seems new to them, we can use their attention to the changed events as evidence about the kinds of changes infants notice. We show babies simple events, such as an adult looking at and then reaching toward an object. We present these events in a "baby theater", either acted out by a person in the room, or on a video screen.

Imitation Studies

Babies tend to imitate the actions of others. This is very obvious in toddlers, who often mimic adult behavior. The same tendency can be seen in even younger infants under very sensitive testing conditions. We investigate whether or not babies will imitate an adult's actions, and, if so, which aspects of the event they reproduce. In these studies, babies interact with an adult experimenter who models an action and then give the baby the chance to imitate it. The actions might be very simple, like looking at and reaching for objects, they may be more complex, like using a novel tool to obtain a toy. We can also vary other aspects of the event, such as the emotion the adult expresses or whether she is familiar or unfamiliar to the infant, to see how these factors affect infants’ imitation.

Eye-tracking Studies

How infants scan events can provide insights into how they understand them. As one example, infants look toward objects that correspond to information they receive from adults: An infant who understands the word “dog” may look at the family pet when she hears her father say “Where’s the dog?” As another example, infants visually anticipate the outcomes of familiar events: An infant may look toward the front door having seen her mother pick up her purse and keys. In our research, we assess these kinds of visual responses using a remote eye-tracking system. Infants view events on a computer screen while infra-red cameras detect exactly where on the screen they are looking. We can then analyze how infants shift attention over time and how their shifts in attention relate to the event they are watching.

•Woodward, A. (2009). Infants’ Grasp of Others’ Intentions. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 18(1), 53-57. PDF
•Levine, S.C., Kwon, M., Huttenlocher, J., Ratliff, K.R., & Dietz, K. (2009). Children's understanding of ruler measurement and units of measure: A training study. In N.A. Taatgen & H. van Rijn (Eds.), Proceedings of the 31st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 2391-2395). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society. PDF
• Kinzler, K.D., Dupoux, E., & Spelke, E.S. (2007). The native language of social cognition. The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 104, 12577-12580. PDF
• Huttenlocher, J. & Lourenco, S.F. (2007). Coding location in enclosed spaces: is geometry the principle? Developmental Science, 10(6), 741-746. PDF
• Ehrlich, S. et al. (2006). The importance of gesture in children’s spatial reasoning. Developmental Psychology, 42(6), 1259-1268. PDF
• Lourenco, S.F. & Huttenlocher, J. (2006). How do young children determine location? Evidence from disorientation tasks. Cognition, 100, 511-529. PDF