The Human Development Group in the NACS program spans faculty in the Departments of Heaing and Speech Science, Kinesiology, Linguistics and Human Development.

Research interests include the development of brain-behavior relationships in motor skills, language, temperment, social behavior, and decision making. This wide range of interests provides students with the opportunity to explore a variety of developmental topics across a range of ages, from infancy through school-aged children. The unifying theme of this work is an emphasis on change over time, or the process of development.

The area of human development is unique in the extent to which it integrates basic and applied developmental research. The laboratories within the area have made a priority not only of conducting cutting-edge research on developmental process, but also of linking these findings with applied research on disorders and intervention.


Bolger, Donald J., Human Development

The core of my research focuses on key issues of reading from a neurobiological, cognitive, and educational perspective. The primary goal of my research is to understand brain development with respect to reading and language and how impairment and remediation are reflected in cortex. From school-based and cross-sectional paradigms to adult training tasks, my work combines innovative and complex methodologies in functional and structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and event-related potentials (ERP) with developmental and behavioral research.

Cassidy, Jude, Psychology

Her interest is in socioemotional development with specific emphasis on attachment.

Clark, Jane, Kinesiology

Dr.Clark's work focuses on understanding the development of movement control and coordination in motor skills. Her current work examines the role of sensory information in the development of upright posture and locomotion in infants. She also has an on-going project to study perception-action relationships with children who have motor coordination problems.

Dougherty, Lea R., Psychology

Dr. Dougherty's research interests lie broadly in the examination of the etiology and course of depression from a developmental, life-span perspective. Within this domain, her research focuses on two areas: (1) an examination of the developmental origins of neuroendocrine dysfunction in depression, which includes examining linkages between possible endophenotypes for mood disorder and specific genotypes; and (2) understanding the phenomenology of depression in preschoolers and establishing empirically-based assessment approaches for depression, and other mood disorders, in very young children.

Fox, Nathan, Human Development

My research centers on the effects of early experience on brain development with special emphasis on the prefrontal cortex. I am interested in social and emotional development and study human infants and young children using electrophysiology(EEG and ERP).

Goupell, Matthew, Hearing and Speech Sciences

We perform psychoacoustical tasks on normal-hearing individuals and those with cochlear-implants to ask questions about binaural hearing, speech understanding, pitch processing, etc. We make computational neural models in an attempt to explain our data and further the understanding of auditory neural processing.

Hatfield, Bradley, Kinesiology

The focus of Dr. Hatfield's program in exercise and sport psychology deals with both the health-related and performance-related aspects of humans in exercise/sport settings.

Huang, Yi Ting, Hearing and Speech Sciences

Language development involves more than just learning words or syntactic rules. During this process, do children consistently generate the same kinds of interpretations as adults do? When they fail to do so, what do these differences reveal about nature of development? My research explores these questions by examining how the moment-to-moment changes that occur during language processing influence the year-to-year changes that emerge over the course of language development. This work relies on the use of eye-tracking, an innovative method that yields implicit and fine-grained measures of children's interpretation, and focuses on changes in development that occur during the early school-aged years.

Jiang, Nan, Linguistics

Nan Jiang studies adult second language acquisition and bilingual language processing from a cognitive perspective. His ongoing research projects concern topics such as bilingual lexical organization, language transfer, the automatization of linguistic knowledge, semantic development in second language acquisition.

Killen, Melanie, Human Development

My research laboratory investigates social and moral cognition in children and adolescents. We study how children and adolescents evaluate straightforward and complex social and moral dilemmas and everyday issues, and how social experience is related to social cognition. In addition, we examine how culture influences social judgments, with collaborative projects in Korea, Japan, Israel, Jordan, Germany, Spain, and the U.K. Our topics include evaluations of racial exclusion, gender exclusion, intergroup bias, intergroup relationships, stereotypes, moral judgment, and social reasoning.

Newman, Rochelle, Director, Language Development & Perception Laboratories, Hearing and Speech Sciences

My research focuses on speech perception, word recognition, and language acquisition. More specifically, I am interested in questions such as how the brain recognizes words from fluent speech, the time course over which different stages of speech processing occur, and how listeners (especially infants) separate different streams of speech that occur at the same time.

Novick, Jared ,

My research seeks to understand the human computational system that supports the real-time interpretation and reinterpretation of sentences. In particular, central to revising initial processing commitments is 'cognitive control.' Cognitive control refers to the regulation of mental activity to guide and support flexible behavior, enabling individuals to bias the selection of appropriate over inappropriate information during goal-directed tasks. Data from behavioral, neuroimaging, and neuropsychological studies suggest shared mechanisms in prefrontal cortex (PFC) that support regulatory functions across a range of tasks, including working memory, attention, and language processing. Using a multiple-method approach, my research asks whether a cardinal function of PFC-supported cognitive control is to override early misinterpretations during sentence processing to prevent comprehension failure.

Oliveira, Marcio A., Kinesiology

Dr. Oliveira's research focuses on the developmental changes in a neural network, the so-called mirror neuron system (MNS), which is thought to be involved in action understanding and production during early experience. He also has ongoing projects that seeks to characterize the developmental process of finger force control and understand changes in the neuromechanical variables as motor control develops.

Redcay, Elizabeth, Psychology

My research examines the development and neural bases of communicative behaviors (e.g. joint attention, theory of mind, social interaction, language) and the interactions between these processes in both typical individuals and individuals with autism (a developmental disorder characterized by atypical communication). I ask how and the extent to which the brain systems underlying these behaviors become specialized and how this neural specialization is reflected in behavioral changes. To examine these questions, I use neuroimaging and behavioral methods with infants, children,adolescents and adults. In some of this research, I use paradigms in which participants engage in a real-time face-to-face communication during fMRI data acquisition, allowing for a more naturalistic social-communicative interaction.

Riggins, Tracy, Psychology

Research in Dr. Riggins's lab investigates the development of cognitive abilities, such as memory, in infants and young children. She is especially interested in how the development of the brain contributes to changes in cognition early in life. These questions are addressed using multiple methodological tools including behavioral and neuroimaging techniques (event-related potentials, ERPs and magnetic resonance imaging, MRI) in both typically developing children and children with neurodevelopmental disorders. The overall goal of research in Dr. Riggins's lab is to develop a better understanding of how early experiences influence the development of brain-behavior relations and result in individual differences in cognitive performance.

Scholnick, Ellin, Sr VP Academic Affairs & Provost, Psychology

Her interest is in ways in which cognitive and linguistic development influence one another and in planning.

Shackman, Alexander ,

Dispositionally anxious individuals-those who tend to express anxiety too intensely or in response to inappropriate cues-are vulnerable to developing anxiety and other psychiatric disorders. These disorders are common, debilitating, and often treatment resistant, underscoring the need to understand the mechanisms linking dispositional anxiety to psychopathology. To this end, our laboratory uses brain imaging, electrophysiological techniques, peripheral physiological measures, and behavioral assays in adults and children to address three broad questions: 1) What is the nature of the large-scale neural circuit underlying variation in anxiety? 2) How does anxiety influence attention, memory & cognitive control? 3) What mechanisms underlie the inhibited behavioral profile characteristic of anxious individuals? Our goal is to understand how variation in anxiety contributes to psychopathology, discover novel endophenotypes, and set the stage for developing improved interventions.

Smith, J Carson, Kinesiology

Dr. Smith is focused on understanding how exercise and physical activity affect human brain function and exert effects on cognitive function and mental health. Dr. Smith investigates the effects of exercise on brain function, as measured using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and electroencephalography (EEG), in people at risk for Alzheimer's disease. Dr. Smith, his team of investigators, and collaborators are interested in the potential efficacy for exercise to affect brain function and memory in healthy older adults at genetic risk for Alzheimer's disease, as well as in patients diagnosed with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI). The ultimate goal is to provide evidence for exercise to delay conversion to Alzheimer's disease and protect against age-related cognitive decline. In addition, Dr. Smith's examines how acute and chronic exercise or physical activity may alter emotional reactivity, attention allocation, and cognitive function among patients with anxiety and/or depressive mood disorders.

Taneyhill, Lisa, Animal and Avian Sciences

The Taneyhill lab studies the vertebrate neural crest, a transient population of migratory cells that ultimately differentiate to become a wide range of structures, including the peripheral nervous system, pigment cells, and the cranial bones and cartilage. Consequently, many human congenital and hereditary malformations (such as craniofacial abnormalities and heart defects), diseases and cancers result from aberrant neural crest development. Our lab uses molecular, cellular, and biochemical techniques to study neural crest formation in the chicken embryo to better understand overall animal growth and development.

• Cognitive Neuroscience of Language Lab
• The Child Development Lab
• The Language Development Lab
• The Motor Development Lab