ABOUT MY WORK
I am a developmental psychologist with a research background in cognitive neuroscience and expertise in statistical analyses. My big, overarching research question is, "How do children learn new mathematical ideas from their environment?" Under this umbrella, I currently have four distinct lines of research, which draw upon a variety of methodologies to tackle different pieces of this broader question. More information and details can be found below.
EDUCATION and EXPERIENCE
CURRENT LINES OF RESEARCH
2010 - 2016
University of Chicago, PhD
Cognitive Development Lab
Mentors: Dr. Susan C. Levine and Dr. Susan Goldin-Meadow
Dissertation: Learning mathematics through action and gesture: Children's prior knowledge matters
2008 - 2010
Children's Hospital Boston, Research Assistant
Laboratories of Cognitive Neuroscience
Mentor: Dr. Charles Nelson
Projects: Infant's experience-dependent face processing | Methodologies: event-related potentials and eye tracking
2004 - 2008
Brown University, B.S.
Neuroscience Major with Honors
Honors Thesis: The effects of early iron deficiency on the neural correlates of recognition memory in school-aged children
Action vs Gesture: What are the behavioral effects of having learned a new idea through action or gesture?
Action
Training
Concrete Gesture Training
Abstract Gesture Training
Third grade children in all three groups improved after training. However, children who learned from the most abstract gesture were best able to solve novel "transfer" problems (e.g. 4+6+2=4+__ and 5+3+7=4+__). Gesture may lead to better generalization than action.
Does gesture work for all children? On this type of measurement problem, some children count lines (hatch mark answer) and some children read the number where the object ends (read-off answer).
Action Training
Gesture Training
First grade children who used the hatch-mark strategy learned from action and gesture. Children in the read-off group only improved after action training. Gesture is not always accessible to all learners.
Mechanisms of Gesture: What are the cognitive, behavioral, and neural mechanisms of gesture understanding?
Simultaneous speech+gesture promoted generalization and retention more so than the other two sequential training conditions (speech->gesture and speech->speech).
In current work, I am using electroencephalagram (EEG) to see whether math instruction with gesture causes mu suppression when children solve math problems after a lesson with gesture. Mu suppression is thought to be associated with action observation and movement execution, and I hope to see if it correlates with learning outcomes in this research.
Gesture organizes visual attention more so than instruction with speech alone. However, this effect is not driven by looking directly at the gesturing hand. After the gesture's novelty wears off, children who continue to stare at it do worse on posttest than those who do not fixate.
a) Gesture+Speech (simultaneous)
b) Speech -> Gesture (sequential)
c) Speech -> Speech (sequential)
a)
b)
c)
Children were trained to solve problems through speech and gesture or speech alone. One week later, the gesture group showed more recruitment of motor regions than the speech alone group when lying still and solving problems in the scanner.
Gesture is powerful because a) it synchronizes with speech, b) recruits motor areas and c) directs visual attention.
Math Misconceptions: How can cognitive principles help to characterize and combat math misconceptions?
Length-Consistent Length-Neutral Length-Inconsistent
"Which angle is bigger?" When presented with this question, we found that 4 year olds with no formal angle experience employed the whole object bias and assumed the experimenter was refering to the overall shape, rather than to the angle measure. In other words, they consistently got the third trial type wrong. We then gave all children a short lesson on angles. Using another word learning principle, mutual exclusivity, we then gave children in the Experimental group a nonce label for the overall shape (e.g., "toma"). Those children were subsequently more likely to identify the proper referent of the word "angle" than their peers in the Control group. Principles of cognitive science can help to combat common math misconceptions.
Early Environment: What early environmental factors affect later math performance and educational outcomes?
Children with iron deficieny in infancy showed altered neural correlates of recognition memory when compared with healthy controls. Findings show that early nutritional deprivation can have long-lasting effect on factors such as myelination of cells in the hippocampus.
In this in-progress study, I ask whether children with pre- and perinatal brain injury show greater sensitivity to parental numerical input than their typically developing peers. If so, it may mean that children with early brain injury are more reliant on parent input, particularly in the domain of numerical cognition.
In this in-progress study, I find that fifth grade children from low socioeconomic status backgrounds show poorer math performance and higher math anxiety than their higher socio-economic status peers. Future work will look at the specific factors that contribute to this disparity, including children's endorsement of gender stereotypes about academic performance.