People
Meet the members of our lab!
Dr. Patricia Bauer
Principal Investigator
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, Ph.D.
Research Associate
Marina has been a research associate in the Bauer Lab since September 2007. She completed 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
Jeni completed her undergraduate work at McMaster University in Canada. There she completed research projects on face processing and cross-modal perception in Dr. Daphne Maurer's Visual Development Lab. After graduation, she worked with Drs. Ellen Bialystok and Fergus Craik at the Rotman Research Institute in Toronto. She is interested in the developmental cognitive neuroscience of memory. Currently Jeni is using behavioral measures, ERP, eye-tracking, and fMRI to learn about the development of memory in infancy through childhood.
Jackie Leventon
Graduate Student
Jackie recently earned her BS in Psychology at the University of Maryland in College Park. Under the guidance of Dr. Amanda Woodward, she completed her honors thesis investigating infants' use of emotional information. Specifically, she explored how 18-month-olds use a person's emotional expressions to predict the future actions of the emoter and as a guide for their own behavior. While studying cognitive development as an undergraduate, her research interests have focused to memory development. She plans to explore this aspect of young children's cognition during the course of her graduate study.
Ayzit Doydum
Lab Coordinator
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.
Elizabeth White
Lab Coordinator
A native of Fairfax, VA, Elizabeth graduated from Emory in May 2009, receiving a BA with high honors in psychology. She worked as a research assistant for the Bauer Lab and conducted her honors thesis with Dr. Patricia Bauer, investigating the development of autobiographical memory in school-age children. Her research interests include autobiographical memory development in children and the use of ERP and fMRI techniques to investigate memory development.
Elizabeth was also a four-year member of the Varsity Softball team during her time as an undergrad at Emory. A nationally ranked program, the Eagles made four NCAA tournament appearances and one World Series appearance during her career.
Jessica King
Lab Coordinator
Jessica recently graduated with a B.S. in biology and a Masters of Teaching in Elementary Education from the University of Virginia. She is currently working on a project conducted by the National Institute of Health to create a battery to measure cognition of people from the age of three to the age of eighty-five. Jessica is also continuing the Dolphin Study for children, which measures both episodic and semantic memory and the ability of children to integrate learned knowledge. Outside the lab, Jessica enjoys traveling, scrapbooking and going to the movies.
Felicia Jackson
Lab Coordinator
Felicia received her BA in Psychology, and BS in Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology from Emory University in May 2009. Having worked 4 semesters as an undergraduate research assistant in Dr. Bauer’s lab, she returned after graduation to work as a Research Coordinator in September of 2009. In her research she is investigating the interaction between episodic and semantic memory as it develops and changes from childhood into adulthood, and is also exploring the relationship between emotions and memory.