Research Areas
Situated at the interface of perception and cognition, and between computation and behavior, the MACLab strives to understand the psychological and computational underpinnings of our amazing abilities to carve up a variable, noisy and continuous perceptual world into abstract and useful categories like words, speech sounds, objects, and colors.
Central to this study is the role of time at many different scales. In particular:
- The development of the percepual and conceptual systems takes place over many months and years. Yet, the ability to integrate knowledge over this long time period has a profound effect on perceptual categories. The study of the timecourse of development then, can yield a clear picture of where the system has been and where it is going.
- Online processing happens very fast, on the order of milliseconds. It is clear that at this timescale, all of the information needed to make sense of a particular stimulus is not available. Speech unfolds over seconds, and visual scenes must be interpreted across multiple saccades. Thus, the studying the detailed temporal dynamics of processing can yield insight into what computations are being performed.
Both of these timescales can be investigated through traditional psychological methods such as discrimination and identification (with adults), and habituation and the head-turn preference procedure (for infants). However, one of the newest and most exciting techniques for understanding cognition is the use of computerized eye-tracking as a tool to examine both infants and adults emerging representations of perceptual stimuli.
Our research spans several areas of perception and development. Please click the links below to learn more about our research:
- Word learning
- Speech perception
- Speech development
- Language processing in special populations
- Non-linguistic Processes
- Computational Modeling
The research conducted in the MACLab is made possible by the generous support of the National Institute of Deafness and Communication Disorders (NIDCD) through grants #1R01DC008089-01A1 and 2P50DC000242-21 (to B. Gantz, Dept. of Otolaryngology), and by the support of the Center for Advanced Studies, Spelman-Rockefeller Fund..