The purpose of our studies is to gain a better understanding of how infants and children learn to perceive, categorize, and remember the objects and events in their environment, both social and nonsocial. In a world of multimodal stimulation to all the senses, how do infants determine which sights and sounds belong together and constitute unitary events and which are unrelated? And how do they lea
rn to attend to stimulation that is relevant to their needs and actions and ignore the vast array of stimulation that is irrelevant? Our goal is to understand how attention, perception and learning develop across the first two years of life and thus to gain insight into how this process goes awry in atypical development such as autism. We test typically developing infants and children as well as children with autism spectrum disorder in tasks of attention and intersensory perception and are interested in contributing to the early identification of autism as well as to the construction of theories of typical developmental processes
