Associate Professor

Department of Psychology
University of British Columbia

Email: darko.odic@psych.ubc.ca

Personal Website: odic.psych.ubc.ca

Humans are remarkably intuitive. Even before we learn to count or measure, we can rapidly judge which plate has more cookies on it or which slice of cake is bigger. How does the acquisition of language enrich and change our abilities to reason about the world around us? Denitza explores this puzzle by examining the interface between language and perception, including the mechanisms that support children's abilities to attach number words to intuitive perceptual magnitudes. She also explores how we reconcile competing visual and linguistic cues, and the role of language in guiding attention to a subset of possible mental representations.

Email: ddramkin@psych.ubc.ca

Personal Website: ddramkin.wixsite.com/denitzapdramkin

Development doesn’t happen in isolation - children simultaneously learn many skills. For example, in just a few months, a crawling, babbling infant becomes an independent, walking, talking toddler. Eloise is interested in how different areas of change interrelate: does one ability forge the way for another? When and how does new knowledge alter our behavior? Her recent work explores how children’s developing understanding of language interfaces with other areas of cognition, including attention, perception, mental representation, metacognition, confidence, and certainty.

Email: ewest@psych.ubc.ca

Noticing mistakes is a very important step when we are learning new things. This way, they can be evaluated and corrected. While learning math, catching errors can be an especially hard task for children. How can they know if an answer is correct when there is an infinite number of possibilities? Maria is interested in understanding how children generate, test, and revise predictions in math using their intuitive number sense, an ability that every child is born with. Her research will also explore how children with math-specific learning disabilities are affected in this process and how different kinds of cognitive intervention can be used to improve their math abilities.

Email: mbrandao@psych.ubc.ca

How do we learn something new? Miranda investigates this question by exploring the underlying learning mechanisms by which humans acquire new knowledge. In much of her work, Miranda explores how visual and auditory regularities of the environmental input may influence the learning of various concepts, including the acquisition of early nouns to the development of more abstract concepts like number. Miranda’s current work utilizes deep neural network models and predictions derived of such models to explore the emergence and development of our intuitive sense of number (i.e., the Approximate Number System). Additionally, Miranda is curious as to how these approximate representations of number change throughout human development and with formal mathematical education.

Email: mlong@psych.ubc.ca

Ayshe is responsible for all day-to-day aspects of the Centre, including calling parents, running studies, and coordinating all of the research assistants. If you are ever in doubt of who to contact, contact Ayshe!

Email: ccd.coordinator@ubc.ca

Carolyn was in the lab from 2015 - 2020, and studied how children learn about the world around them and act as social agents, including how children reason about their own confidence, and whether this relates to their ability to evaluate others. Archeologists in the year 3020 are still digging up Carolyn's to-do post-it notes from the earth, trying to decypher their mythical powers of productivity.

Email: cebaer@psych.ubc.ca

Personal Website: cebaer.wix.com/carolyn-baer

Cory was in the lab from 2018 - 2020, working on projects investigating the processes that give rise to our visual sense of number, as well as developing novel statistical techniques (through the Data Science Initiative) for missing data in developmental psychology. After he left, the lab's collective knowledge of Python dropped by around 100% for a few months.

Personal Website: corydbonn.github.io/