​Understanding self and other

How and when do children start understanding themselves, and others around them? Which comes first: understanding ourselves, or understanding others? And are these two opposites: the more I focus on our differences, the more I focus on myself and ignore what the other knows differently? - or are they complementary: does a better understanding of myself enable better self-other distinction and coordination?

Previously, I have been investigating to what extent young infants are altercentric, that is, rely on others' perspectives when encoding information about the world. In future projects I am interested in addressing on one hand how this tendency may change across development and what factors contribute to these changes, to what extent there is intra-individual consistency in people's tendency to attend to others.

Most recently, my interest has turned to the mechanisms and consequences of perceiving ourselves similar to-, or distinct from- others, and how this contributes to self-other alignment and coordination.

​​Episodic memory and self-perspective

 How do young children begin to encode events as specific and unique in space and time? I am interested in the role of the developing self in the development of memory systems that rely on a self as an anchor and a unique perspective. This unique perspective may enable young children to develop flexibility in their memory and in their social cognition: to decide whether they anchor a memory to someone else, and decide when this memory has to be discarded or updated, based on new information.

I have recently been awarded a Sapere Aude Research Leader Grant from the Danish Independent Research Fund (DFF), to investigate these questions. Read more about the grant on the DFF website. 
​The project started Fall 2023, if interested, get in touch!

---

SYNchrony in Caregiver-Child Interactions across Neurodiversity

This project will investigate biobehavioral synchrony - the matching of behavioral, affective states, and biological rhythms, between caregivers and children - a key contributor to development of child social- cognitive- and emotional skills. We are interested in the mechanisms, and in translating know-how in practice, on how different levels of synchrony are related to each other as well to subsequent developmental outcomes.

I am collaborative partner in this Horizon Europe Framework Programme (HORIZON)-funded Twinning project in which we will foster sustainable collaboration in a cross-national and cross-disciplinary network, with the University of Warsaw as the widening partner, the University of Heidelberg University of Milano, University of Copenhagen, and the University of Trento to facilitate knowledge transfer and exchange of best practices in the research on biobehavioral synchrony.

---

​​Objects in a social context​

How do we perceive objects, and how is this influenced by the social environment? Much of cognition happens in a social context, and recently we have began to appreciate the fundamental ways in which this affects how we perceive and remember things. Often this helps us with interaction and coordination, other times it results in interesting 'mistakes' that we may make if we cannot ignore others' perspectives even when we should focus on our own. What are the benefits of such susceptibility to others around us, and how does this influence what we encode and recall about our environment? And what role may this play early in development?

https://manybabies.github.io/MB2/

​ManyBabies 2

I am co-lead, together with 3 other scholars, on the ManyBabies 2 project. The ManyBabies projects are large-scale, international collaborative projects inspired by the ManyLabs initiatives.

​MB2's central topic is infant theory of mind, and the overarching goal is to develop and probe paradigms to probe infants' ToM with spontaneous / nonverbal tasks. Currently there are more than 40 labs involved, and in the first study of MB2 we are designing a conceptual replication of previous paradigms looking at belief-based action anticipation with eye-tracking.