Associate Professor

D.Phil, University of Sussex
Area: Developmental/Cognitive

Contact information:
Email: rakison@andrew.cmu.edu
Psychology office: 354N Baker Hall
Psychology phone: 412-268-3477

Director, Infant Cognition Lab
http://www.psy.cmu.edu/~rakison/Infant_Cognition_Lab/

Research Interests:

Whether or not infants’ earliest perception of the world is a “blooming, buzzing, confusion,” it is not long before they develop mental representations or concepts of the structure and order among the objects and events around them. Research in my lab focuses on studying how this is achieved: When and how do infants categorize perceptually different objects as the same and generalize from their experience to novel instances? When and how do infants learn about the motion properties of animates and inanimates such as self-propulsion, causality, and goal-directed action? How does infants’ action in the world affect their emerging concepts? And how does conceptual change occur throughout the first years of life? I address these questions within an information-processing framework although I also combine this approach with aspects of evolutionary psychology. As a result, a focus of my research is to examine the extent to which early learning and development is underpinned by domain-specific or domain-general mechanisms.

The major approach I use to address these questions is to study the behavior of human infants. In most cases, I employ behavioral methodologies that make use of infants’ looking (e.g., habituation, visual preference) and action behavior (e.g., imitation). I also conduct research with very young children with autism and compare their conceptual development to that of typically developing infants. Finally, I develop computational models of early perceptual and concept development as a means of providing greater insight into the mechanisms of change in the first years of life.
 

Publications:

Rakison, D. H. (in press). Does women’s greater fear of snakes and spiders originate in infancy? Evolution and Human Behavior.

Oakes, L.M., Cashon, C.H., Casasola, M., & Rakison, D. H. (Eds.) (in press). Infant perception and cognition: Recent advances, emerging theories, and future directions. New York: Oxford University Press.

Rakison, D.H. & Lupyan, G. (2008). Developing object concepts in infancy: An associative learning perspective. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development. 73(1), 1-110

Cicchino, J. B., & Rakison, D. H. (2008). Producing and processing self-propelled motion in infancy. Developmental Psychology, 44, 1232-1241.

Rakison, D. H. (2006). Make the first move: How infants learn the identity of self-propelled objects. Developmental Psychology, 42, 900-912.
 

Assistant to Rakison:

Rosanna Breaux (rbreaux@andrew.cmu.edu)

Current Graduate Students:

Yevdokiya Yermolayeva,  yyermola@andrew.cmu.edu

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Related Links:

Curriculum Vitae (pdf file)

Infant Cognition Laboratory

Individual Webpage

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