David J Lewkowicz, PhD

David Lewkowicz is a Senior Research Scientist in the Yale Child Study Center. He received his BA from Brandeis University, his PhD from the City University of New York, and he 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, a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, the American Psychological Association, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and he has received a Senior Investigator Award from the International Society for Developmental Psychobiology.

Lewkowicz investigates perceptual and cognitive development in infancy and early childhood. The goal is to gain insights into the behavioral and neural mechanisms underlying the acquisition of speech, language, and social skills and the ways that early experience contributes to their emergence. To do so, Lewkowicz investigates the development of multisensory attention to audiovisual speech and its integration in developmentally typical infants and children, infants and young children at risk for developmental disabilities (e.g., autism), and typical adults. One current area of research is the developmental emergence of the perceptual and attentional mechanisms needed to solve the multisensory cocktail party problem. This problem arises whenever we are confronted with multiple interlocutors (e.g., at a party) and must rapidly and correctly integrate their respective faces and voices and then perceptually segregate them into unitary multisensory entities to successfully communicate with them. Lewkowicz's research has been funded by NIH, NSF, private foundations, and corporate partners. He has published widely and his work has been featured in the New York Times, the Washington Post, CBC Television & NPR's Science Friday.