Kristen Swan Tummeltshammer

Brown University · Department of Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences

Word learning is a social act. Because there is an arbitrary relation between words and their meaning, children must learn words from other people. Other people, however, are not always reliable sources of knowledge. People can be ignorant, hold false beliefs, or simply be deceptive. How do children evaluate the reliability of sources of knowledge...

The brain is adapted to learn from interactions with the environment that predict or enable the procurement of rewards (Schultz, 2010). For infants, the main caregiver (often the mother) is most associated with primary biological rewards such as food and warmth, as well as the most likely provider of emotional and social rewards such as comfort and...

The visual context in which an object or face resides can provide useful top-down information for guiding attention orienting, object recognition, and visual search. Although infants have demonstrated sensitivity to covariation in spatial arrays, it is presently unclear whether they can use rapidly acquired contextual knowledge to guide attention d...

Differential experience leads infants to have perceptual processing advantages for own- over other-race faces, but whether this experience has down-stream consequences is unknown. Three experiments examined whether 7-month-olds (Range = 5.9-8.5 months, N = 96) use gaze from own- versus other-race adults to anticipate events. When gaze predicted an...

This study investigates whether infants are sensitive to backward and forward transitional probabilities within temporal and spatial visual streams. Two groups of 8-month-old infants were familiarized with an artificial grammar of shapes, comprising backward and forward base pairs (i.e. two shapes linked by strong backward or forward transitional p...

Across two eye-tracking experiments, we showed that infants are sensitive to the statistical reliability of informative cues and selective in their use of information generated by such cues. We familiarized 8-month-olds with faces (Experiment 1) or arrows (Experiment 2) that cued the locations of animated animals with different degrees of reliabili...

Social attention cues (e.g., head turning, gaze direction) highlight which events young infants should attend to in a busy environment and, recently, have been shown to shape infants' likelihood of learning about objects and events. Although studies have documented which social cues guide attention and learning during early infancy, few have invest...

With many features competing for attention in their visual environment, infants must learn to deploy attention toward informative cues while ignoring distractions. Three eye tracking experiments were conducted to investigate whether 6- and 8-month-olds (total N = 102) would shift attention away from a distractor stimulus to learn a cue–reward relat...

Adults tend to perceive speech sounds from their native language as members of distinct and stable categories; however, they fail to perceive differences between many non-native speech sounds without a great deal of training. The present study investigates the effects of categorization training on adults' ability to discriminate non-native phonetic...

Young infants have demonstrated a remarkable sensitivity to probabilistic relations among visual features (Fiser & Aslin, 2002; Kirkham et al., 2002). Previous research has raised important questions regarding the usefulness of statistical learning in an environment filled with variability and noise, such as an infant's natural world. In an eye-tra...

By 8 months of age, infants use statistical regularities and perceptual cues to orient attention (e.g. Kirkham et al., 2007; Wu & Kirkham, 2010). However, it is unclear whether infants are sensitive to the reliability of individual attentional cues. In this eye-tracking study, 8-month-olds were familiarized with a reliable face, which always looked...

Categorical perception, an increased sensitivity to between- compared with within-category contrasts, is a stable property of native speech perception that emerges as language matures. Although recent research suggests that categorical responses to speech sounds can be found in left prefrontal as well as temporo-parietal areas, it is unclear how th...

In a visual occlusion task, 4-month-olds were given a dynamic sound cue (following the trajectory of an object), or a static cue (sound remained stationary). Infants' oculomotor anticipations were greater in the Dynamic condition, suggesting that representations of visual occlusion were supported by auditory information.

Infants are bombarded with a bewildering array of events to learn. In such an environment, referential cues (e.g., gestures or symbols) highlight which events infants should learn. Although many studies have documented which referential cues guide attention and learning during infancy, few have investigated how this learning occurs. The present eye...

Infants are bombarded with a bewildering array of events to learn. In such an environment, referential cues (e.g., gestures or symbols) highlight which events infants should learn. Although many studies have documented which referential cues guide attention and learning during infancy, few have investigated how this learning occurs. The present eye...