Lisa Feigenson

About

Lisa Feigenson is a professor affiliated with the Laboratory for Child Development at Johns Hopkins University, housed within the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. Her research focuses on understanding how infants and young children perceive and make sense of the world around them. The lab investigates fundamental questions about early cognitive development, including memory for hidden objects, the developmental foundations of mathematical thinking, children's logical reasoning abilities, and the impact of surprise on infants' learning processes. The lab's work has gained recognition in prominent media outlets such as the New York Times, NPR, and Time Magazine, highlighting the significance and public interest in their findings. Through a combination of in-person and online studies involving children from birth to age ten, Feigenson's research employs engaging experimental methods like simple games and puppet shows to measure children's responses and cognitive abilities. The lab also actively involves undergraduate students in research, fostering a collaborative academic environment.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Developmental psychology
• Psychology
• Social psychology
• Cognitive psychology
• Artificial Intelligence
• Neuroscience
• Communication

Selected publications

• Violations of expectation trigger infants to search for explanations

  Cognition · 2021 · 55 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Online measures of looking and learning in infancy

  Infancy · 2021 · 31 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Infants in laboratory settings look longer at events that violate their expectations, learn better about objects that behave unexpectedly, and match utterances to the objects that likely elicited them. The paradigms revealing these behaviors have become cornerstones of research on preverbal cognition. However, little is known about whether these canonical behaviors are observed outside laboratory settings. Here, we describe a series of online protocols that replicate classic laboratory findings,…

  PublisherDOI

• Emergence of the Link Between the Approximate Number System and Symbolic Math Ability

  Child Development · 2020 · 31 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Experimentally manipulating Approximate Number System (ANS) precision has been found to influence children's subsequent symbolic math performance. Here in three experiments (N = 160; 81 girls; 3-5 year old) we replicated this effect and examined its duration and developmental trajectory. We found that modulation of 5-year-olds' ANS precision continued to affect their symbolic math performance after a 30-min delay. Furthermore, our cross-sectional investigation revealed that children 4.5 years an…

  PublisherDOI

• Stable individual differences in infants’ responses to violations of intuitive physics

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2021 · 30 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Infants look longer at impossible or unlikely events than at possible events. While these responses to expectancy violations have been critical for understanding early cognition, interpreting them is challenging because infants' responses are highly variable. This variability has been treated as an unavoidable nuisance inherent to infant research. Here we asked whether the variability contains signal in addition to noise: namely, whether some infants show consistently stronger responses to expec…

  PublisherDOI

• Dynamic changes in numerical acuity in 4‐month‐old infants

  Infancy · 2020-10-27 · 25 citations

  articleSenior author

  Preverbal infants represent the approximate numerosity of visual and auditory arrays: By 6 months old, they reliably discriminate eight dots or tones from 16 (a 1:2 ratio), but not eight from 12 (a 2:3 ratio). The precision of this approximate number sense improves gradually over childhood and into adulthood. However, less is known about numerical abilities in younger infants, and in particular, whether there is developmental change in the number sense in the first half year of life. Here, in fo…

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• NIH Grant R03HD054416

  NIH · $162k · 2009

• Understanding error-driven learning in infancy and early childhood

  NSF · $650k · 2021–2025

• The Role of Surprise in Enhancing Early Learning

  NIH · $440k · 2014–2017

Frequent coauthors

• Justin Halberda

  Johns Hopkins University

  33 shared

• Melissa E. Libertus

  University of Pittsburgh

  21 shared

• Alexis Sierra Smith-Flores

  University of California, San Diego

  12 shared

• Jinjing Wang

  Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

  10 shared

• Jennifer M. Zosh

  10 shared

• Aimee E. Stahl

  College of New Jersey

  9 shared

• Shipra Kanjlia

  Johns Hopkins University

  8 shared

• Darko Odic

  University of British Columbia

  8 shared

Awards & honors

• Troland Award from the National Academy of Sciences
• Boyd McCandless Early Career Award from the American Psychol…
• Scholar Award from the James S. McDonnell Foundation

Similar researchers at Johns Hopkins University

• Richard Huganirh-210
• Michela Gallagherh-104
• Patricia Janakh-88