Katarina Begus

• MA in Psychology MSc in Cognitive Neuroscience, PhD in Psychological Sciences
• Assistant Professor at University of Copenhagen

Significance This paper addresses the possible developmental origins of humans’ preference for native speakers. Infants’ preference to attend to someone speaking their native language is well documented and has been interpreted as a developmental precursor of our adult tendency to divide the social world into groups, preferring members of one’s own...

Investigating learning mechanisms in infancy relies largely on behavioural measures like visual attention, which often fail to predict whether stimuli would be encoded successfully. This study explored EEG activity in the theta frequency band, previously shown to predict successful learning in adults, to directly study infants' cognitive engagement...

The majority of current developmental models prioritise a pedagogical approach to knowledge acquisition in infancy, in which infants play a relatively passive role as recipients of information. In view of recent evidence, demonstrating that infants use pointing to express interest and solicit information from adults, we set out to test whether givi...

In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in the motivations behind, and the function of, infant pointing behaviour. Many studies have converged on the view that early pointing reflects a motivation to share attention and interest with others. Under one view, it is the sharing of attention itself that is the ultimate function of point...

It is well established that, from an early age, human infants interpret the movements of others as actions directed towards goals. However, the cognitive and neural mechanisms which underlie this ability are hotly debated. The current study was designed to identify brain regions involved in the representation of others' goals early in development....

This study investigates 16-month-old infants' sensitivity to the informativeness of evidence and its potential link to infants' ability to draw accurate causal inferences and predict unfolding events. Employing concurrent EEG and eye tracking, data from 66 infants revealed significantly increased theta oscillatory activity when infants expected to...

Humans engage in cooperative activities from early on and the breadth of human cooperation is unparalleled. Human preference for cooperation might reflect cognitive and motivational mechanisms that drive engagement in cooperative activities. Here we investigate early indices of humans’ cooperative abilities and test whether 14-month-old infants exp...

Adapting studies typically run in the lab, preschool, or museum to online data collection presents a variety of challenges. The solutions to those challenges depend heavily on the specific questions pursued, the methods used, and the constraints imposed by available technology. We present a partial sample of solutions, discussing approaches we have...

Interpreting others’ actions as goal-directed, even when the actions are unfamiliar, is indispensable for social learning, and can be particularly important for infants, whose own action repertoire is limited. Indeed, young infants have been shown to attribute goals to unfamiliar actions as early as 3 months of age, but this ability appears restric...

Active learning is a critical component of human development, however, the mechanisms supporting it are not fully understood. Given that early learning experiences may affect both infants' immediate learning success, as well as their motivation to learn, it is particularly important to investigate the mechanisms of active learning in this period, w...

Active learning is a critical component of human development, however, the mechanisms supporting it are not fully understood. Given that early learning experiences may affect both infants' immediate learning success, as well as their motivation to learn, it is particularly important to investigate the mechanisms of active learning in this period, w...

Most theories of infant social learning focus on how infants learn whatever and whenever the adults decide to teach them. While infants are well equipped to learn from adults, recent research suggests infant social learning is not a passive process but that infants may play an active role in acquiring information and modulating their learning accor...

In their response to our article (1), Kinzler and Liberman (2) challenge our proposal that the primary basis for infants’ preference for native speakers stems from a preference for social partners, who are perceived as the best teachers. Instead, the authors propose that, in addition to infants perceiving native speakers as optimal informants, infa...

Brain and nervous system development in human infants during the first 1000days (conception to two years of age) is critical, and compromised development during this time (such as from under nutrition or poverty) can have life-long effects on physical growth and cognitive function. Cortical mapping of cognitive function during infancy is poorly und...

Brain and nervous system development in human infants during the first 1000 days ‐ which includes pregnancy and the first two years of life ‐ is critical, and risk of compromised development during this time can have a deep impact on physical growth and cognitive function into adulthood. Recent research has shown that under nutrition in infancy is...

A pilot study was conducted to assess the feasibility of using fNIRS as an alternative to behavioral assessments of cognitive development with infants in rural Africa. We report preliminary results of a study looking at working memory in 12-16-month-olds and discuss the benefits and shortcomings for the potential future use of fNIRS to investigate...

The goal of our project is to establish assessments to evaluate the efficacy of nutritional interventions during the first 1000 days of life. Here we examine behavioral performance on a standardised developmental assessment scale (Mullen Scales of Early Learning; MSEL) and anthropometric growth indices in infants at a research station in West Afric...

The goal of our project is to establish assessments to evaluate the efficacy of nutritional interventions during the first 1000 days of life. Here we measure cognitive function in newborn infants. Cortical mapping of the brain during infancy is rarely undertaken in low‐income countries due to the lack of transportable neuroimaging methods. Studying...

Perception of depth from both monocular and binocular cues develops in the first year of life. However, reduction of discrimination thresholds via weighted averaging of depth cues does not develop until much later in childhood (Nardini, Bedford & Mareschal, PNAS 2010). Cue combination models often assume that cues are well calibrated (unbiased). In...

The Mullen Scales of Early Learning is a developmental assessment battery which can be administered from birth to five years of age to separately assess gross motor, fine motor, receptive language, expressive language, and visual receptive abilities. Scores for each subscale as well as an overall composite score are typically computed based on a co...

Appropriate nutrition in the first 1000 days of life is essential for optimal brain development and function. Neurobehavioral assessments of cognitive function can only be used to detect effects of nutritional deficiencies once they reach the point of observable behaviour, thus reducing the possibility of targeted early intervention strategies. The...

Although it is undeniable that the motor system is recruited when people observe others' actions, the inferences that the brain generates from motor activation and the mechanisms involved in the motor system's recruitment are still unknown. Here, we challenged the popular hypothesis that motor involvement in action observation enables the observer...

Adults can integrate multiple sensory estimates to reduce their uncertainty in perceptual and motor tasks. In recent studies, children did not show this ability until after 8 years. Here we investigated development of the ability to integrate vision with proprioception to localize the hand. We tested 109 4- to 12-year-olds and adults on a simple po...

Integrating multiple sensory estimates while weighting each according to its own reliability can minimise the uncertainty of the overall estimate. Whilst human adults are able to combine multiple sources of sensory information optimally, recent studies indicate that in typical development this ability does not develop until late childhood (Nardini,...