About Me
Hello! I’m a developmental psychologist currently working as a postdoc at the University of Potsdam in Germany. I run research projects with infants and children using both eye-tracking and EEG methodologies, and below you can find more details about this work and resulting publications. When not at work googling matlab error messages, I am usually wandering aimlessly around Berlin listening to a variety of quality educational podcasts.
Research Statement
I’m fascinated by the cognitive processes that underlie our action and language understanding. While speech and action share many similarities in terms of structure and execution, we still have a long way to go before we can understand the relation between the cognitive processes that drive processing of these two streams of information. Taking a developmental and individual-differences approach, my research aims to disentangle and specify the mechanisms that underlie action and language processing during infancy and beyond.
Academic Positions
I work on two projects of the DFG-funded research unit “Crossing the Borders.” The main aim of the research unit is to examine the shared domain-general processes that drive cognitive development. One project examines parallels in segmentation of speech and action. I work on this project alongside Birgit Elsner, Isabell Wartenburger and Romy Räling. We want to examine whether the processes that underlie segmentation of speech can also support segmentation of action sequences. The second project is led by Barbara Höhle. This project examines how domain-general developmental processes (e.g. inhibitory control) can explain language and social development. To do this, we created a battery of eye-tracking tasks that aims to measure these processes throughout development.
Education
Title of thesis: “Temperament and early word learning: The effect of shyness on referent selection and retention”
- Supervised by Gert Westermann and Katherine Twomey
- Examined by Melissa Allen and Larissa Samuelson