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Department of Developmental Psychology: Welcome!

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Developmental Psychology investigates age-related changes in behavior and experience that occur across the lifespan of an individual. Research examines different areas of development, e.g., cognitive, emotional, or social capabilities, and asks questions such as: At which age and how exactly do the changes occur? Which factors (e.g., in the individual or the environment) are the causes of developmental changes?

Recent research foci of our department include empirical studies on

  • (social-)cognitive development in early infancy (mainly understanding of other people’s actions, imitative learning, control of intentional action),
  • Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience (neural correlates of cognitive development)
  • relations between cognitive abilities (mainly executive functions, theory of mind) and developmental problems in middle childhood,
  • development in adolescence and in emerging adulthood,
  • relations of learning and development.

Research methods include eye-tracking, EEG, and video-based behavioral analyses.

Projects

Crossing-Projekt (DFG FOR 2253)

Crossing the borders: The interplay of language, cognition, and the brain in early human development

PIER-Project (DFG GRK 1668)

Intrapersonal developmental risk factors in childhood and adolescence: A longitudinal perspective

Laboratories

BabyLAB

Investigates the cognitive development of children from the age of 4 month onwards

Videostudio

Production of video based footage for psychological behavior analysis and stimulus presentation in experimental settings

Recent publications

Xie, S., Hoehl, S., Moeskops, M., Kayhan, E., Kliesch, C., Turtleton, B., Köster, M., & Cichy, R.M. (2022). Visual category representations in the infant brain. Current Biology, 32, 1-11. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2022.11.016

Vanoncini, M., Boll-Avetisyan, N., Elsner, B., Höhl, S. & Kayhan, E. (2022). The role of mother-infant emotional synchrony in speech processing in 9-month-old infants. Infant Behavior and Development, 69, 101772. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infbeh.2022.101772

Kayhan, E., Nyugen, Q. T., Matthes, D., Langeloh, M., Michel, C., Jiang, J., & Hoehl, S. (2022).Interpersonal neural synchrony when predicting others’ actions during a game of rock-paper-scissors. Scientific Reports, 12, 12967. doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-16956-z

Gumbsch, C., Adam, M., Elsner, B., Martius, G., & Butz, M.V. (2022). Developing hierarchical anticipations via neural network-based event segmentation. Proceedings of the 2022 IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning (ICDL 2022)

Hilton, M., Wartenburger, I., Verrel, J., & Elsner, B. (2022). Pre-boundary lengthening and pause signal boundaries in action sequences. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 44. Retrieved from https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5ks5h1h4