CURRENT PROJECTS

PUBLICATIONS

Overview of Research Interests:

I study cognitive and behavioral development from a dynamic systems perspective. There are four elements of this theoretical perspective that I feel offer key insights into development. First is the emphasis on embodiment, keeping “higher-level” cognition connected to sensori-motor processes. Related to this emphasis is the focus on process and the details of how behavior emerges in real time from the history of the system and the current task context. Third, a dynamic systems approach emphasizes the integration of processes across tasks and time-scales. Finally, the particular flavor of dynamic systems theory that forms the basis of my research program emphasizes the insights that can be gained by linking theory and research to neural principles. Specifically, I have used a particular class of dynamic systems models—dynamic neural fields—to capture both real-time and developmental processes in a way that can interface with behavioral observations and be constrained by neural data.

My research focuses on basic memory processes, specifically in the context of spatial cognition. Approaching general questions about cognitive development within spatial cognition has advantages from a developmental perspective. In particular, spatial details are relatively easy to control and manipulate experimentally, space provides a clear metric for similarity, and the same spatial tasks can be employed across populations with different levels of cognitive ability (e.g., across large age ranges, with disordered populations). Within spatial cognition, I primarily study how reference frames are established and utilized in service of working memory tasks. Reference frames are a fundamental component of spatial cognition—they are required to locate objects in space, remember or communicate about these locations, and to plan and execute actions. Although other models of spatial cognition acknowledge the importance of reference frames, few models explicitly address how reference frames are established and coordinated in these tasks and no models have addressed the development of reference frame selection.

This is a fundamental issue in developmental science because the ability to stably and flexibly coordinate reference frames undergoes profound change between infancy and 6 years. Children move from encoding and remembering the locations of objects relative to the body—egocentric encoding—to reliably using more global world-centered or allocentric frames of reference. Beyond the initial use of global allocentric frames, reference-frame alignment processes also become more flexible between 3 and 6 years, allowing selection among multiple candidate reference frames depending on which is most behaviorally relevant. For instance, following re-orientation, children tend to rely on geometric cues to re-align spatial memory to perceived reference frames, but non-spatial features can also guide this process under particular conditions. This ability to flexibly select and re-align world-centered frames can reveal novel insights about the world (e.g., task space 1 is like task space 2—a form of spatial analogy) and, may provide the foundation for the types of symbolic “insight” required to understand maps and scale models.

To understand the processes that underlie these diverse changes in spatial cognition, my research has helped establish a new theory of spatial cognition, the Dynamic Field Theory (DFT), and has moved this theory in a novel direction—to develop a neurally-plausible real-time mechanism for the selection and coordination of reference frames. The DFT provides a general framework in which to study embodied cognitive development, and has been applied across diverse areas of research, beyond the development of spatial cognition: motor planning, motion perception, infant habituation, control in autonomous robotics, spatial language, serial ordering of behavior, early word learning, development of executive function, visual change detection, and more. By employing a framework that can bridge different areas of psychology and human behavior, my research can help unify disparate areas of research to move toward an overarching theory of developmental change. Furthermore, by grounding the DFT in known neural principles, this work connects to developmental neuroscience in ways that other theories of spatial cognition cannot.

Most recently, I have begun to expand my research from spatial cognition to memory for other visual features, like colors and shapes. This work is exploring the generality of developmental change in the visuo-spatial system. Specifically, my colleagues and I have shown how changes in neural connections in the DFT can capture the dramatic developmental changes between 3 and 6 years of age in the effects of reference frames on spatial memory—children’s memory for locations and their perception of reference frames is becoming more precise over this period of development, leading to non-linear changes in biases toward or away from reference frames. My current research is exploring whether there are corresponding changes in the precision of memory for colors. Preliminary research using the visual change detection task suggests this might be the case, and I am currently testing this hypothesis more rigorously. In addition, I am using similar tasks to look at how young children’s poorer memory for spatial locations might affect their ability to correctly remember the identities of multiple objects within a scene. This line of research is also designed to explore potential mechanisms for developmental change by comparing trajectories across the “what” and “where” systems of visuo-spatial cognition to identify which underlying components might be shared versus unique.