My research examines early cognitive development, focusing on the following topics:

1. Attention, memory, and representation: This project explores the process by which infants direct their attention to relevant information and make use of it. How do infants keep track of objects and events around them when facing an enormous amount of information? What might help infants direct their attention more efficiently?

2. The role of experience in early learning: Visual and action experiences are crucial for learning. This project explores the process by which infants detect regularities and extract rules. Can infants learn a physical rule after watching a set of examples? Do action experience and visual observation affect early learning in the same way?

3. Theory of mind: Psychological knowledge constitutes an important domain of human cognition; this project explores early understanding about people. How do infants interpret others' actions? Do they impute in others preference, desire, or belief? Current projects focus on infants' use of communicative cues (such as facial expressions and linguistic input) to interpret others' actions.

Selected Publications

Wang, S., & Mitroff, S. R. (in press). Preserved visual representations despite change blindness in infants. Developmental Science. PDF

Wang, S., & Baillargeon, R. (2008). Can infants be "taught" to attend to a new physical variable in an event category? The case of height in covering events. Cognitive Psychology, 56, 284-326. PDF

Wang, S., & Baillargeon, R. (2008). Detecting impossible changes in infancy: A three-system account. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 12, 17-23. PDF

Wang, S., & Kohne, L. (2007). Visual experience enhances infants' use of task-relevant information in an action task. Developmental Psychology, 43, 1513-1522. PDF

Wang, S., & Baillargeon, R. (2006). Infants' physical knowledge affects their change detection. Developmental Science, 9, 173-181. PDF

CV PDF

Poster at 2008 ICIS PDF