Current Lab Members

Principal Investigator

Linda B. Smith, PhD., Chancellor's Professor
smith4@indiana.edu 
CVFaculty Webpage
Research Interests: Perceptual and cognitive development in early childhood; classification and catergorization; interactions between perception and language.

Special Projects Manager

Char Wozniak
chwoznia@indiana.edu

Research Interests: Children are born curious, like scientists, actively exploring their world. They spontaneously experiment - they smell, tatse, bite, coo, cry, giggle, blow, hum, and touch - they shake, punch, squeeze, push, cruch, rub, and try to pull things apart. I am intensely interested in observing children and exploring the many ways they learn about their world.

Lab Manager

Kelly Irwin
kelirwin@iu.edu

Research Interests: I am fascinated by the way children learn about the world around them. From the very beginning, they soak up everything about their surroundings using every single one of their senses. I love observing and interacting with children as they learn and grow.

Assistant Scientist

Swapnaa Jayaraman
swapnaa@indiana.edu

CVWebpage
Research Interests: Development is all about change: macro changes like motor milestones and micro changes like neural organization, connectivity and growth. When and how do these changes occur? What are the mechanisms behind these changes? What factors affect these changes? These are questions that developmental scientists are trying to answer in small and large ways. I am particularly interested in how infants perceive, process, and understand faces, and how age, experience, and the environment affect these processes. I take both neurological as well as behavioral approaches to answering these questions.

Postdoctoral Fellow

Erin Anderson
ema1@iu.edu

CV
Research Interests: My research investigates infants' early visual experience with inter-object relations. Using head-mounted cameras to capture the infant's point of view in naturalistic settings, we can understand what the distribution of spatial relations is in the environment and what roles age, context, and parents play in shaping these.

Postdoctoral Fellow

Sara Benham
sjbenham@iu.edu

CV
Research Interests: My research focuses on the relationship between lexical and phonological bases of word learning in children with typical and atypical language development. I am particularly interested in detecting principles of organization and structure in word and sound learning using network-based approaches.

Postdoctoral Fellow

Jeremy Borjon
jborjon@iu.edu

CV
Research Interests: My developing research program is aimed at understanding how the autonomic nervous system shapes and guides behavior during development. Using a combination of wireless physiology sensors, motion capture, and head-mounted eye tracking, we will be able to computationally reconstruct and dissect the naturally occurring behavior of human children and their parents.

Postdoctoral Fellow

Hadar Karmazyn
hkarmazy@iu.edu

CV
Research Interests: I am interested in understanding how children's visual processing relates to language development.

Postdoctoral Fellow

Linger Xu
txu@iu.edu

CV
Research Interests: My research focuses on studying the development of interpersonal coordination at sensory-motor level. We conduct infant-parent interaction experiments, use state-of-art multimodal wearable sensors and develop novel time-series analysis methods and computational models. I also use social robotic agents to investigate the effects of different real-time coordinated behaviors in human-robot interaction studies.