Research

The Learning, Cognition, & Development Lab (LCD Lab) studies how young children learn and develop. These are the sub-topics and research questions we focus on:

Memory & Memory Development

How do we learn to remember? How does our ability to retrieve the past change across development? In the LCD Lab, we examine young children’s ability to recollect different types of information, over varying periods of time. Moreover, we identify mechanisms that give rise to changes in retrieval abilities and memory development across the lifespan.

Word Learning & Language Development

How do children learn new words? How do young learners detect regularities in their environment in order to map words to objects? In the LCD Lab, we analyze how children track the frequency and co-occurrence of words and objects in order to acquire new words.

Categorization & Generalization

How do we learn about new objects? How do we organize our world into categories?  For example, how do we come to understand that a chair is a ‘chair’? … and how do we generalize this knowledge to all chairs? Young infants and children go through developmental changes in their ability to organize and generalize information. In the LCD Lab, we examine factors of the learning environment and the learner that lead to developmental differences in categorization and generalization.

Psychology & Education

A central pursuit in the LCD Lab is to connect traditional psychological research with more educationally relevant research. For example, we connect research on categorization & generalization in the lab with how children acquire and transfer science concepts taught in school.