People
Meet the members of our lab!
Dr. Patricia Bauer
Principal Investigator
patricia.bauer@emory.edu
My research interests are in cognitive development in the transitions from infancy to early childhood and from the preschool to the early school years. I am particularly interested in developments in episodic and autobiographical or personal memory. By late in the first to early in the second year of life, infants accurately recall specific events over delays of weeks and even months. Many factors that affect memory in older children and adults also influence infants' memories. These findings demonstrate continuity in recall processes across a wide developmental span. Yet there also are pronounced developmental changes in memory over the first years of life. By combining behavioral and electrophysiological (ERP) measures my colleagues and I are working to understand how the functional changes we observe relate to developments in the basic processes of encoding, consolidation, storage, and retrieval of information from memory; and to neuro-developmental changes that take place in the same period of time. In recent work, I have extended investigations of memory development to theoretically interesting special populations, including infants born prematurely, internationally adopted infants, and maltreated infants. I am also working to understand the neural, cognitive, and social contributions to the phenomenon of childhood amnesia—the relative paucity among adults of verbally accessible memories of the first years of life. Given that even infants remember the past, why do adults have so few early memories? To inform this question, my colleagues and I are conducting prospective studies to track the "fates" of early memories as preschoolers make the transition to the school years and beyond. In the process, we are identifying the determinants of remembering and forgetting as well as informing the individual, familial, and cultural influences that shape autobiographies from childhood through adulthood.
Marina Larkina
Research Associate
mlarki2@emory.edu
Marina has been a research associate in the Bauer Lab since September 2007. She is currently completing her doctorate in developmental psychology at the Institute of Child Development at the University of Minnesota. Her research concentrates on memory development. She is specifically interested in the role of social interactions in the development of autobiographical memory as well as in strategic remembering of preschool and early school-age children.
Jeni Pathman
Graduate Student
tpathma@emory.edu
Jeni completed her undergraduate work at McMaster University in Canada. There she completed a research project with Dr. Catherine Mondloch on face processing and her honors thesis with Dr. Daphne Maurer on cross-modal perception. After graduation, she worked with Ellen Bialystok and Fergus Craik at the Rotman Research Institute in Toronto. She is interested in the developmental cognitive neuroscience of memory.
Kathryn Cochrane
Graduate Student
klcochr@emory.edu
Kathryn attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as an undergraduate. While there she completed an Honor's Thesis under the direction of Dr. J. Steven Reznick on working memory in infancy. After graduation, she went on to manage the Dr. Reznick's Carolina Infant Lab for a year before heading to graduate school. Kathryn is interested in brain and memory development in infants and young children, specifically the development of episodic and autobiographical memory combining both behavioral and neuroscience techniques.
Kevin Dugas
Lab Coordinator
kdugas@emory.edu
Kevin Dugas joins the Bauer Lab at Emory, originally from Nova Scotia, located on the beautiful East coast of Canada. Kevin recently graduated from St. Francis Xavier University (rated as Canada’s best primarily undergraduate university) in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, with his BA with Honors in Psychology. His undergraduate honors thesis, under the supervision of Dr. Ann Bigelow, explored the relationship among preschool children’s developmental understanding of visual perspective taking, false belief, and lying. In short, the study investigated the relationship among children’s ability to understand that other people see things differently than they do, that other people can believe things differently than the children know to be true, and that they can manipulate others’ beliefs using deceitful communication. Kevin intends on pursuing further studies in psychology after his research experience at Emory. Aside from his aspirations for research in psychology, Kevin is also a professional class competi tive bagpiper (and a member of the 78th Highlanders Halifax Citadel grade 1 pipe band), and enjoys travelling the world with his music.
Ayzit Doydum
Lab Coordinator
odoydum@emory.edu
Ayzit recently received her B.A. in Psychology and minored in Cognitive Neuroscience at Temple University in Philadelphia, PA. Ayzit conducted her honors thesis work with Dr. Nora Newcombe investigating the feature binding abilities of preschool-aged children in working and long-term memory. Her primary interests include memory development, cognitive testing, and the neural substrates of memory and learning. Outside the lab, Ayzit loves to draw, get lost in reading good books, and explore new restaurants and cuisines.