THE EARLY SOCIAL COGNITION LAB
Research Projects
People
Publications
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? Can they also trust and learn from agents such as robots? 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.
PEOPLE
Lauren H. Howard, Ph.D
Principal Investigator, Lab Director
Georgia May
Emily Peeks
Emily Peeks is a senior from Queens, New York, who is double majoring in psychology and public health on the bio track. She is the president of the American Sign Language Club and the Vice President of Psi Chi while also serving as the Director of Inclusion for Alpha Delta Pi sorority. A fun fact about Emily is that she is double-jointed and fluent in ASL!
Valerie Bigio
Valerie is a senior from Cali, Colombia majoring in psychology. She is the secretary of the ASL club, co-president of the Chabad club, and a Peer-Academic Coach. A fun fact about Valerie is that she has lived in 4 different places.
Shen Wang
Zoe Finiasz
Katherine (KT) Thomas
Peter Merani
Tess Flanagan
Hye Rin Lee
Hannah Rodriguez
Emily Kolb
Peiru Yu
Enya Meade
Ellen Verry
Natalie Hutchins
You Jin Park
Fiona Waters
Julia McAleer
Lauren Hein
Roberto Martinez
Ryan Potts
Mary Schutt
Maddie Shaw
Francesca Testa
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PUBLICATIONS
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Howard, L.H., Wilson, J., Langer, A., & Marshall, P. (2024). Draw a robot task: The influence of children's age and drawings on robot interactions. In: Proceedings of the 28th IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication.
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Howard, L. H., Waters, F. F., & Gerson, S. A. (2024). Social models influence visual perspective taking in memory. Journal of Cognitive Psychology, 1-11.
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Cuffari, E., Howard, L.H., Reilly, A., Belka, A., & Samson, K. (2024). A little goes a long way: How gesture visibility in video lectures impacts attention and learning, Proceedings of the 46th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 2262-2269.
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Yang, T., Langer, A., Howard, L., Marshall, P. ,Wilson, J. (2023). Towards an ontology for generating behaviors for socially assistive robots helping young children. In: Proceedings of the AAAI Symposium on Artificial Intelligence and Human-Robot Interaction. Best Paper Award.
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ManyPrimates et al. (2022). The evolution of primate short-term memory. Animal Behavior and Cognition, 9(4), 428-516.
Howard, L.H. & Decety, J. (2022). A cognitive neuroscience perspective on moral development. In M. Killen and J. Smetana (Eds.), Handbook of Moral Development. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Howard, L. H. & Lonsdorf, E.V. (2022). The eyes have it: Using non-invasive eye tracking to advance comparative social cognition research. In Primate Cognitive Studies. Cambridge University Press.
Flanagan, T., Rottman, J., & Howard, L.H. (2021). Constrained choice: Children’s and adults’ attribution of choice to a humanoid robot. Cognitive Science, 45(10), e13043.
Wakefield, E., Novack, M., Congdon, E., & Howard, L.H. (2021). Individual differences in gesture interpretation predict children’s propensity to pick a gesturer as a good informant. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 205, 105069. doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2020.105069
Hopper, L., Gulli, R., Howard, L. H., Kano, F., Krupenye, C., Ryan, A., Paukner, A. (2020). The application of noninvasive restraint-free eye tracking methods for use with nonhuman primates. Behavior Research Methods. doi: 10.3758/s13428-020-01465-6
Hopper, L., Jacobson, S., & Howard, L.H. (2020). The development of flexible problem solving in young children. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 200, 104966. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2020.104966
Wakefield, E., Novack, M., Congdon, E., & Howard, L.H. (2020). Is she a good teacher? Children learn to use gestures as a marker of a good informant. Proceedings of the 42nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.
ManyBabies Consortium (2020). Quantifying sources of variability in infancy research using the infant-directed speech preference. Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science, 3(1). 24-52. https://doi.org/10.1177/2515245919900809
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Howard, L.H., Riggins, T., & Woodward, A. (2020). Learning from others: The effects of agency of event memory in young children. Child Development, 91(4), 1317-1335. doi: 10.1111/cdev.13303
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Howard, L.H., & Woodward, A. (2019). Human actions support infant memory. Journal of Cognition and Development, 20(5), 772-789. doi: 10.1080/15248372.2019.1664549
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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.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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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]