David J Lewkowicz, PhD

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.