Our research focuses on how and why cognition changes in the course of development  and learning. How do limited cognitive abilities of infants evolve into  truly remarkable behaviors  of older children and adults? How do  simple perceptual groupings of young infants give rise to abstract  concepts later in development? How do people develop the ability to  strategically focus on some aspects of  information while ignoring others? And  what are the interrelationships among the development of attention,  memory, language, and generalization? In an attempt to answer these  questions, we study infants,  children, and adults. Our research uses a broad range of tasks from simple discrimination to reasoning and  problem solving and a variety of behavioral and neuroscience  methods. All projects in the lab are  focused around the following broad research interests:

• Origins of knowledge

• The role of learning in cognitive development

• Interrelationships among the development of attention, memory, and generalization

• Knowledge representation and its change in the course of development