Natasha Kirkham

Professor of Developmental Psychology

President of the International Congress of Infant Studies (ICIS)

Research Interests

I am interested in the development of selective attention in infants and preschool age children. I am involved in two streams of research, one of which addresses the question of how infants learn about their environment with regard to the statistical regularities inherent in their perceptual world, and the other of which investigates the roles of attention and executive functions in young children. I employ several different methodologies in my research projects, using both corneal reflection eye-tracking and habituation/dishabituation with infants, executive function tasks with preschoolers/adults, and fNIRS recordings from infants.  Recent work has focussed on how the home environment impacts on the development of attention (e.g., noise, chaos).

Publications

Conference or Workshop Item

Wu, Rachel and Yu, C. and Smith, L.B. and Kirkham, Natasha Z. and Yurovsky, D. (2011) Model selection for eye movements: assessing the role of attentional cues in infant learning. In: 12th Neural Computation and Psychology Workshop, 8-10 Apr 2010, London, UK.