Research Interests

My research examines the development of sensitivity to 3D object information, and my specific interest is in how infants, children and adults learn to understand that novel objects are structurally coherent in three dimensions and continuous in space and time. Over the years, this research has relied on a combination of behavioral measures, eye-tracking, and brain imaging techniques to investigate the nature and development of mechanisms underlying our perception of 3D objects.

Current projects are evaluating how children and adults arrive at a conceptual understanding of the pictorial dimensions and geometric properties (e.g., symmetry, complexity, and possibility) that characterize real objects. We have used a variety of behavioral assessments, including free-viewing displays, object manipulation, categorization/sorting and eye-tracking tasks.