Cameron Ellis

About

Dr. Cameron Ellis is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Stanford University. His research focuses on understanding the developing mind of infants through methods from neuroscience and cognitive science. He leads the Scaffolding of Cognition Team, which investigates fundamental questions about how infants perceive, attend, learn, and remember. His work employs techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with awake, behaving infants to access the cognitive mechanisms underlying early development. Dr. Ellis's research has contributed to understanding the organization of the infant visual cortex, demonstrating that infants aged 5-23 months possess retinotopic maps and visual area boundaries, indicating a greater maturity of the extrastriate cortex than previously thought. Additionally, his studies have shown that the infant hippocampus supports statistical learning from a very young age, with activity related to learning observed around three months old, and that attention mechanisms in infants involve frontal brain regions active during attentional orienting tasks. His work provides insights into early brain development, highlighting the early recruitment of neural circuits involved in perception, memory, and attention, and offers a model for understanding how the mature brain functions through noninvasive neuroimaging techniques.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Artificial Intelligence
• Neuroscience
• Psychology
• Cognitive psychology
• Biology
• Computational biology

Selected publications

• Neural event segmentation of continuous experience in human infants

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2022 · 73 citations

  How infants experience the world is fundamental to understanding their cognition and development. A key principle of adult experience is that, despite receiving continuous sensory input, we perceive this input as discrete events. Here we investigate such event segmentation in infants and how it differs from adults. Research on event cognition in infants often uses simplified tasks in which (adult) experimenters help solve the segmentation problem for infants by defining event boundaries or prese…

  DOI

• Hippocampal encoding of memories in human infants

  Science · 2025-03-20 · 39 citations

  article

  Humans lack memories for specific events from the first few years of life. We investigated the mechanistic basis of this infantile amnesia by scanning the brains of awake infants with functional magnetic resonance imaging while they performed a subsequent memory task. Greater activity in the hippocampus during the viewing of previously unseen photographs was related to later memory-based looking behavior beginning around 1 year of age, suggesting that the capacity to encode individual memories c…

  PublisherDOI

• Functional networks in the infant brain during sleep and wake states

  Cerebral Cortex · 2023-08-29 · 18 citations

  article

  Functional brain networks are assessed differently earlier versus later in development: infants are almost universally scanned asleep, whereas adults are typically scanned awake. Observed differences between infant and adult functional networks may thus reflect differing states of consciousness rather than or in addition to developmental changes. We explore this question by comparing functional networks in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of infants during natural sleep and awa…

  PublisherDOI

• Atypical Brain Aging and Its Association With Working Memory Performance in Major Depressive Disorder

  Biological Psychiatry Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging · 2024-04-26 · 5 citations

  articleOpen access
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Functional networks in the infant brain during sleep and wake states

  bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) · 2023-02-15 · 5 citations

  preprintOpen access

  Abstract Functional brain networks are assessed differently early in development than at maturity: infants are almost universally scanned during sleep, whereas adults are typically scanned awake while resting or performing tasks. Observed differences between infant and adult functional networks may thus reflect these differing states of consciousness rather than or in addition to developmental changes. We explore this question by comparing functional networks in fMRI scans acquired from infants…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Nicholas B. Turk‐Browne

  Yale University

  96 shared

• Tristan S. Yates

  Yale University

  78 shared

• Michael Arcaro

  California University of Pennsylvania

  57 shared

• Léo Paly

  16 shared

• Gaël Chételat

  Université de Caen Normandie

  16 shared

• Marion Delarue

  16 shared

• Lena J. Skalaban

  Temple University

  15 shared

• Jonathan D. Cohen

  Princeton University

  14 shared

Labs

• Vice Provost for Student AffairsPI

Education

• B.S.

  Auckland University

  2013

• M.A.

  Princeton University

  2017

• Ph.D.

  Yale University

  2021

Awards & honors

• FLUX Dissertation Prize (2021)
• James Grossman Dissertation Prize (2021)
• William Kessen Teaching Award (2019)

Similar researchers at Stanford University

• Jordan Gerard Starckh-230
• Leanne Williamsh-140
• Carol Dweckh-122