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INFORMATION FOR

Our Team

  • Senior Research Scientist/Senior Lecturer

    Prior to joining the Yale Child Study Center, Dr. Aslin was a Senior Research Scientist at Haskins Laboratories from 2017-2023, and prior to Haskins, Dr. Aslin was on the faculty at the University of Rochester for 33 years, where he established the Rochester Baby Lab. Dr. Aslin’s work focuses on perceptual and motor systems, language acquisition, and statistical learning. His work on statistical learning showed that infants can understand structure from rapid streams of speech or images by simple exposure. More recent work has shown that infants direct their attention to auditory and visual cues that have an intermediate level of complexity. Dr. Aslin primarily focuses on studies utilizing fMRI, EEG, and fNIRS. Dr. Aslin has been the recipient of several major awards, including the APA Distinguished Scientific Contributions Award (2014) and the APS Mentor Award for Lifetime Achievement (2015), and several honors, including election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2006) and the National Academy of Sciences (2013). In his spare time, Dr. Aslin enjoys cycling and completes at least one multi-day ride each year in the Rocky mountains or the French alps.
  • Prior to joining Yale, Aditya obtained a Bachelor of Arts in Music from the University of Cambridge (2017), graduating with a First Class degree with Distinction. His final Analysis Portfolio explored two-dimensional sonata form in Respighi’s Quartetto Dorico, and the value of neo-Riemannian theory in explaining transition passages in Chausson’s Poème. He also holds a Masters degree from Stanford University in Music, Science, and Technology (2019). At Stanford, he taught introductory computer science, and worked in the Neuromusic Lab at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics, where his research examined the neural correlates of piano duet improvisation using EEG, and violinists’ expressive gesture profiles using motion capture technology. Aditya’s primary research interests include the embodiment of musical structure, and the perception of familiar melodic schemata in galant music. When he is not busy gelling subjects’ scalps for EEG experiments or taping reflective markers to performers for motion capture experiments, Aditya is an avid violinist. He was a winner of the Cambridge University Symphony Orchestra concerto competition in 2015, and the Stanford Symphony Orchestra Concerto Competition in 2018.
  • Postdoctoral Associate

    My research focuses on cognitive development, especially around factors that affect children's perception, attention, and learning. I became interested in this subject while working on a few longitudinal studies that followed the development of children between birth and preschool years (e.g. the British Autism Study of Infants Siblings, Sighted Babies of Blind Parents Study, and Qatar Premature Children Study). During my PhD, I studied the effects of multisensory stimulation on babies' visual perception and learning. To advance my research skills, after my PhD, I focused on neuroscientific methods to measure cognition in children and adults. In my current PostDoc position, I design and implement experimental tasks that use eye-tracking and EEG to measure spatial attention and statistical learning. Outside work, I read popular science books and participate in a monthly book club.
  • Associate Research Scientist in the Child Study Center

    Dr. Lewkowicz is a Senior Research Scientist in the Yale Child Study Center. He received his BA from Brandeis University and his PhD from the City University of New York and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in child mental health at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University. He is a former President of the International Congress on Infant Studies and a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, the American Psychological Association, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Dr. Lewkowicz investigates perceptual and cognitive development in infancy and early childhood, with two primary foci: the development of multisensory perception and attention and the development of pattern/sequence learning. The ultimate aim of Lewkowicz's research program is to gain insights into the acquisition of speech, language, and social skills and the ways that specific early experience contributes to their emergence. A current specific focus of the research in Lewkowicz's lab is two-fold. The first is the developmental emergence of the perceptual and attentional mechanisms needed to solve what has come to be known as the multisensory cocktail party problem (MCPP). The MCPP arises whenever we are confronted with multiple interlocutors and must rapidly integrate corresponding face-voice pairs and then perceptually segregate them into unique individuals to communicate successfully with any one of them. The second current focus is on the development of multisensory attention to audiovisual speech and its integration in developmentally typical as well as in infants and young children at risk for developmental disabilities (e.g., autism). Lewkowicz has published widely in the psychological literature including developmental psychology and psychobiology.
  • My research, broadly defined, evaluates how very young children learn and comprehend spoken words. I utilize psycholinguistic methods such as the visual world paradigm and eye-tracking to better understand how infants and toddlers process the acoustic-phonetic detail in the speech signal. My work translates basic science procedures to clinical populations, including toddlers with language delay, in order to develop more sensitive metrics for diagnosing and treating childhood language impairments.
  • Associate Research Scientist in the Child Study Center

    Dr. Sara Sanchez-Alonso is an Associate Research Scientist at the Child Study Center. She specializes in language neurodevelopment and multi-modal imaging (fMRI-fNIRS). Dr. Sanchez-Alonso received a Master of Science in speech and language pathology funded by an Erasmus Mundus Joint Masters scholarship from the European Commission. Subsequently, she completed post-baccalaureate research training in Dr. Angela Friederici's lab at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany. She holds a Ph.D. from Yale University, where she trained in psychology and neurobiology of language. During her postdoctoral training, Dr. Sanchez-Alonso worked with Dr. Richard Aslin at Haskins Laboratories and implemented the first fMRI/fNIRS integrated data collection effort at the Yale Brain Imaging Center. She joined the Yale Child Study Center as research faculty in 2023.
  • Tristan is interested in how the brain networks that support learning and memory change across development, influencing the types of memories we retain, the inferences we draw, and our abstract knowledge of the world. Tristan has always been fascinated with how both biology and culture contribute to human behavior, thanks in part to her fraternal twin sister.

Research Staff

Collaborators

Lab Alumni