Research Scientist
Evelina Dineva
edineva@iu.edu
CVResearch Interests: I study infant development because of a deep appreciation for the difficulty of learning the skills that seem so simple when we grow up. When we (grownups) look at a scene, it immediately makes sense: we fluently identify structures or content. Imagine the first time a face is in an infant’s field of view. What do you think they see? Likely, they perceive not much more than blurry distributions of shades. I want to understand the developmental pathway of learning by inferring low-level structures (like those shared among faces) and recognizing higher-level content (a familiar face). I’m particularly interested in how infants impact their learning trajectories as they gain motor control over what they place in view. My background is in mathematics and cognitive neurosciences. And it informs my approach to investigating the dynamics—like the balance between stability and variability—with which structures or content reoccur.