Attention and Memory in Early Development: Evidence from Face Processing

From the very beginning of life, infants actively engage with the speaking faces around them, using both sight and sound to build the foundations of social and cognitive development. This talk explores two complementary lines of research: (1) how audiovisual experience shapes infants’ attention to and recognition of faces, drawing on evidence from looking-time and ERP methods; and (2) how early experiences with own- and other-race faces contribute to the emergence of the other-race effect (ORE), influencing both individuation and category learning. If time allows, the talk will also touch on related findings in multisensory learning with nonsocial stimuli. The session concludes by considering the broader implications for early cognitive development and outlining promising directions for future research.
 

 Speaker: Aslı Bursalıoğlu, PhD 

Bursalıoğlu is a developmental cognitive neuroscientist who investigates early cognitive development using measures of looking behavior and brain activity. She completed her BA in Psychology at Koç University and her PhD in Developmental Psychology at Loyola University Chicago. Her research examines how infants develop face specialization in visual and audiovisual contexts. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Northwestern University.