Faculty

Academic Interests: Object Perception, Infant Development, and Eye Tracking

Research: My research is focused on understanding the nature and development of object perception in early infancy.  For example, how do we come to understand that real objects are coherent and spatiotemporally continuous in 3-dimensions?  And, which parts of the brain are functioning to support these mechanisms in infants and adults?  I am interested in how infants process global aspects of shape as well as local features of objects, and how these mechanisms operate together in early development.  To address these questions, I am testing whether young infants can discriminate between 2-D depictions of 3-dimensionally possible and impossible objects.  To accomplish this, I am measuring looking times and eye movements (using an eye-tracker) to evaluate exactly where infants allocate their attentional resources when viewing picture displays of structurally coherent versus incoherent objects.  Infants as young as four months appear to make use of several kinds of pictorial depth cues present in pictures of objects and rely on this information to differentiate between possible and impossible figures.

Honors: Martin Braine Fellowship Award for Research in Cognitive Development (2006); Vision Sciences Society Graduate Student Research Award (2006)

Publications:

Shuwairi, S. M., Albert, M. K., & Johnson, S. P. (2007). Discrimination of possible and impossible objects in infancy. Psychological Science, 18, 303-307.

Shuwairi, S. M., Curtis, C. E., & Johnson, S. P. (2007). Neural substrates of dynamic object occlusion. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 19, 1275-1285.

Website: The Baby Lab at Lehman College