University of London, Birkbeck College

Post-Doc, Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development

Other Affiliations: Université de Bourgogne, Le Laboratoire d'Etude de l'Apprentissage et du Développement

Affiliated Research fellow

Thesis Title: Rules and similarity in the development of category learning in children and infants

About

I am developmental psychologist interested in what it is like to be a baby, then a toddler and so on into childhood and beyond and beyond. Learning is a huge part of development and learning never stops so development does stop either. Nevertheless, human's get pretty complicated pretty quickly so i prefer to begin at the begin. Studying thought and reasoning in the earliest years of life. Currently I am interested in concept formation, time perception, how babies pick individual words of the continual stream of speech, in how we learn to learn.

During my PhD, I investigated the origins of concept formation in infancy. How do babies learn to find patterns and regularities in the world.. all these small furry animals are dogs, those ones are cats, this one specifically is Spot and this one Felix and collectively they're all pets. And they're also mammals, animals, things you might expect to meet in the home or see in cartoons. And having got all that sorted, you now have to learn to classify people, food, toys, furniture, vehicles, emotions, abstract relations. And all this while trying to learn a first language from scratch at the same. Gosh, it's complicated being a baby. No wonder they're bursting into tears all the time.

Beside, all that I am interested in harnessing new technologies in psychology research.. but more along the lines computer-games and iphone apps than brain scanners or NIRS (yes that's what's happening in the photo.) I also have few secret projects that i can't talk about here ;-)

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