THE EARLY SOCIAL COGNITION LAB
Research Projects
At the Early Social Cognition Lab, we explore the way infants and young children learn from the social world around them.
Current reseach questions include:
>Memory for Social Events
How and why do children seem to learn most effectively in the presence of other people? What mechanisms might allow us to easily learn from others, even in the first few months of life?
>Learning from Specific Social Partners
Do children learn and remember information that is provided by some social partners over others? What attributes do infants attend to when deciding which person to trust? Do certain life experiences alter the social partners that children prefer?
>COMPARATIVE COGNITION
Recent research in the lab explores the ways in which human children are socially similar to non-human primates such as Chimpanzees, Gorillas, and Capuchin Monkeys. Do these non-human species remember social situations in ways that are similar to humans? Are there important differences in the way non-human primates attend to or learn from social situations that could tell us more about our own development?
In order to answer these questions, we utilize fun and interact methods such as eye tracking, imitation games, and memory paradigms. These methods allow us to examine what infant, children, and non-human primates remember about events without relying on their ability to verbally tell us what they are thinking.
Research Projects
Publications
People
PEOPLE
>Lauren H. Howard, Ph.D.
Principal Investigator, Lab Director
>Natalie Hutchins
Lab Manager
>You Jin Park
Researching Assistant
>Fiona Waters
Research Assistant
>Julia McAleer
Researching Assistant
>Lauren Hein
Researching Assistant
Zoe Finiasz
Katherine (KT) Thomas
Peter Merani
Tess Flanagan
Hye Rin Lee
Hannah Rodriguez
Emily Kolb
Peiru Yu
Enya Meade
Ellen Verry
PUBLICATIONS
Howard, L.H., Riggins, T., & Woodward, A. (2019). Learning from others: The effects of agency of event memory in young children. Child Development. doi: 10.1111/cdev.13303
Flanagan, T., Rottman, J., & Howard, L.H. (2019). Do Children Ascribe the Ability to Choose to Humanoid Robots? Proceedings of the 41st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Montreal, Canada.
Lonsdorf, E.V., Engelbert, L & Howard, L.H. (2019). A competitive drive? Same-sex attentional preferences in capuchins. American Journal of Primatology. doi: 10.1002/ajp.22998
Chirls, J., Kaplan, M., Gebre-Ab, Y., Ortiz, M., & Howard, L.H. (2018). Shaping Perceptions by Hand: The Influence of Motor Fluency on Facial Expression Perception. Proceedings of the 40th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Madison, Wisconsin.
Howard, L.H., Festa, C., & Lonsdorf, E. (2018). Through their eyes: The influence of social models on attention and memory in capuchin monkeys. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 13(2), 210-109.
Liberman, Z., Howard, L.H., Vasquez, N., Woodward, A. (2017). Children's expectations about conventional and moral behaviors of ingroup and outgroup members. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2017.03.003
Howard, L., Wagner, K., Woodward, A., Ross, S., Hopper, L. (2017). Social models enhance apes memory for novel events. Scientific Reports, 7, 40926. [link]
Howard, L., Henderson, A., Carrazza, C. & Woodward, A. (2014). Infants’ and young children's imitation of linguistic ingroup and outgroup informants. Child Development, 86, 259-275. [link]
Howard, L., Carrazza, C., & Woodward, A. (2014). Neighborhood linguistic diversity predicts infants’ social learning. Cognition, 133, 474-479. [link]
Decety, J., & Howard, L. (2014). A neurodevelopmental perspective on morality. In M. Killen and J. Smetana (Eds.), Handbook of Moral Development. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Decety, J., & Howard, L. (2014). Emotion, morality, and the developing brain. In M. Mikulincer and P. Shaver (Eds.), Mechanisms of Social Connection: From Brain to Group. Washington DC: American Psychological Association.
Decety, J. & Howard, L. (2013) The role of affect in the neurodevelopment of morality. Child Development Perspectives, 7, 49-54. [link]
Barr, R., Shuck, L., Salerno, K., Atkinson, E., & Linebarger, D. (2010). Music interferes with learning from television during infancy. Infant and Child Development, 19, 313-331. [link]