​What does your lab study?
 
Our research is focused on learning about and understanding the cognitive abilities, and particularly the cognitive control, exhibited by humans (children and adults) and other species, primarily the great apes and monkey species. This work is conducted largely at the Language Research Center of Georgia State University in Atlanta, GA, but we also work with species at other locations such as the National Zoo in Washington, DC and at Zoo Atlanta. In addition, we work with children in local day care centers, and also in collaboration with the SUCCESS Lab.  Our specific topics include things like self-control, prospective memory, metacognition, perceptual and perceptual illusions, numerical cognition, and various aspects of choice behavior and decision making.
 
What do children enjoy most about the research?
 
We try to create tasks for which the rationale makes sense to the children, in a way that makes them want to succeed.  They enjoy the challenge of showing how smart they are, and of figuring out rules or even little tricks that let them succeed.  Working with the same children for two or three years allows us to see them develop into wonderful young thinkers, with newly emerging cognitive capacities.
 
What are things families might do at home to improve children's learning?
 
In nearly all areas that we study, some simple techniques such as practicing (as in the case of learning to count) or engaging in memory games (in the case of improving prospective memory) could help children improve their learning. We also focus on topics such as the emergence of metacognition, which allows learners to control and monitor their own thoughts (and learning processes), and ideally, they come to find methods of making themselves better at studying. We would encourage families to talk with children about how they think about problems, and how they test possible solutions, as these also may help engage metacognitive strategies. 

​What does your lab study?
 
At the SUCCESS lab, I study the different kinds of learning available to children at different ages  and in different circumstances and how the development of the different learning systems in the brain that underlying those kinds of learning affects both typical and atypical cognitive development.
 
In particular, I have two specific projects I’m working on right now. In one of the projects, we are looking at how well children at different ages can learn new visual symbols related to different matching tasks without any verbal instructions about what the symbols mean. We are also interested in how helpful the symbols are to the tasks once learned and how easily they generalize to new tasks and circumstances. Learning symbols for concepts (in people the “symbol” is usually a word) is thought to allow us to more easily hold things in memory and think about them. It is seen as the building block for higher level cognition. Understanding the development of non-language symbol learning ability and the role that symbols play in aiding other cognitive processes is very important for understanding the role that language plays in learning and thinking and whether and how other kinds of symbols might be used to increase higher cognitive processing when language is not possible. To this end, we also study symbol learning in a similar fashion in monkeys.
 
In my second current project, I am studying the role that abnormalities in perceptual learning may play in autism spectrum disorder. As we go through the world perceiving our environment, our brain is constantly learning to make adjustments to the way we process and represent the things we perceive. These minor adjustments allow us to refine our perception based on the regularities in the world around us but also flexibly adjust over time if those regularities change.  This learning from simple experience makes it easier for us to discriminate things that are similar, but it also allows us to represent commonality and this can help us correctly categorize things that share perceptual similarity. These adjustments are known as perceptual learning. Recent research suggests that children with autism spectrum disorder may have atypical perceptual learning and this may cause difficulties learning categories based on perceptual similarity. My colleagues in Buffalo and I have been examining how perceptual learning affects both categorization and basic perceptual discrimination in children with autism, but I also test typically developing children at different ages at the SUCCESS lab to understand the role that perceptual learning plays in the typical development of category learning and perceptual discrimination abilities.
 
What do children enjoy most about the research?
 
All our tasks are done as simple games on the computer. Even in this temporary era of social distancing, we just play the same games over Zoom. Children love to play computer games.
 
What are things families might do at home to improve children's learning?
Children need human connection and feedback to learn. They need you to talk to them, to listen to them, and younger children particularly need you to read to them. Young children (and many older children) also learn best through play so anytime you can make learning a game, you can improve your child’s  learning.

​What does your lab study?
Your brain is always working. It keeps track of what happens all around you, even when you don’t realize it. Human brains, whether they are infant, child, or adult brains, are really good at finding patterns in events happening around them. Once human brains have learned a pattern, they can use it to predict events in the future! (I bet you didn’t know you could predict the future!) For example, even a young child who knows nothing about driving can learn from observation that traffic lights change color in a predictable pattern. As a result, when the child sees a yellow light he or she knows that the light will soon turn red. He or she can predict what happens next!
In the NeuroLearn Lab, we study how these simple types of pattern learning and prediction work together with other processes to achieve complex skills. Some of these complex skills can include learning language, learning to enjoy and play music, or even playing sports. Discovering how these learning processes work together can help us to develop interventions for children who face extra difficulties in learning language. These difficulties may include hearing loss, neurological conditions, growing up in impoverished environments, or any number of other situations. We aim to show that simple, easy to use computer- or tablet-based pattern learning games as well as specific types of music training can easily and inexpensively help improve language skills.
What do children enjoy most about the research?
To help understand pattern learning, we measure brain activity using a method called electroencephalography. We use a net filled with sensors that fits on the head like a hood to measure electrical changes in the brain that tell us how a child is using his or her brain (but not what he or she is thinking!). This shows us what is often portrayed in movies as “brainwaves”. Lots of children, teens, and even adults love to see themselves wearing the sensor net and especially love to see how things they do like blinking, chewing, and talking change their brainwaves.
What are things families might do at home to improve children's learning?
Children will learn no matter what. It is their job, and they are good at it. The most important thing for adults to remember is that having real life positive experiences with respected adults that are paying attention is key. It helps children learn that they love to learn and that the world is interesting. Having relaxed conversations with an adult about life, the world, what’s going on in the moment, or anything of interest to the child helps children to learn that they are worthy of learning and contributing to the world. The more conversations that occurs between children and adults with both contributing, the more younger children learn language and older children learn about how the world works. Even when time is limited, purposely having conversations with children during the time that is available and carving out at least some regular positive face to helping children learn.

​What do you study?
We're interested in the ways in which social and self-control processes together and separately relate to various socio-emotional outcomes, such as behavioral and interpersonal problems. These processes are what we call individual differences – traits that kids are born with and, in combination with with experiences and environmental contributors, to lead to differential outcomes.
In terms of current work, we’re pursuing a number of different studies. One of the big ones at the moment entails collecting data from children (3-5 years) in daycare settings looking at social processes during naturalistic observations. So we’re watching kids play with each other, coding basic social behaviors, and considering the way in which individual differences traits contribute to variation in these behaviors.
The other area of the work we do is with nonhuman primates. Our goal is to collect parallel data from children and nonhuman primates to allow us to look at common sets of inhibitory control as well as social processes and consider neurobehaviorally-based pathways to various behavioral outcomes across species.

​How might families benefit from your research?
The current work we’re doing exposes kids to the research process, which gets kids interested and excited just about even using the word “research.” Having that sort of word as part of kids’ vocabulary and knowing what that is early helps support kids’ interest in science and math.
What would parents really like to know about your research?
A lot of what we’re interested in is the variation among kids. And the idea that that variation among kids is why the same experience and the same context result in different outcomes.

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​What does your lab study?
Researchers in our lab are studying empathy as a risk and protective factor for depression and anxiety in children, especially within the context of parent-child interactions. Our work aims to develop an empirical conceptualization of empathy and identify correlates of negative empathy and positive empathy across childhood.  We use diverse methodology to study empathy and its correlates across behavioral, physiological, and neural units of analysis

What do children enjoy most about the research?
Families who participate in our studies enjoy study exercises in which children and families reminisce about their shared emotional experiences.  They enjoy learning about how family members experienced difficult and happy family events.


What are things families might do at home to improve children's learning?
​We don’t study learning, but here are tips for things parents can do to help children be more empathic:
1. Behave in caring and affectionate ways toward their children to provides examples of how to act empathically and strengthen positive parent-child relationships so children are receptive to parents’ examples.
2. Respond to their children’s emotions with contingent responses, like comforting a child’s crying and laughing with a child’s laughter. 
3. Explain what they feel during emotional parent-child interactions the impact of the child’s behavior on others’ feelings.  It is important to be warm and accepting rather than harsh or dismissive during these discussions.