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Infant and Child Development

Overview

Organisation profile

Research Group Leads: Professor Caroline Floccia, Dr Patricia Kanngiesser, and Dr Denis Tatone

We are a team of developmental psychologists investigating how infants and children learn to communicate, understand others, and participate in the social world. Our research explores the foundations of language, social reasoning, and early conceptual development, as well as the emergence of norms and cooperation.

We study how children in diverse environments and cultural contexts perceive and learn language and make sense of the social world. Using methods such as eye tracking, behavioural experiments, and interviews with parents and children, we aim to uncover the processes that shape early learning and development. We use these insights to design new language assessment tools and to innovate measures for studying child development.

Our research is conducted in a dedicated developmental research space, the School of Psychology’s Babylab and in collaboration with schools and nurseries locally and globally.

Research Areas

  • Language acquisition
  • Conceptual development
  • Social behaviour
  • Cross-cultural

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Collaborations and top research areas from the last five years

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  • Children and adults across 15 countries believe in human uniqueness of mind: a cross-cultural investigation of cross-species mind perception

    Neldner, K., Maurits, L., Junker, M., Abbas, L., Abbas, N., Abis, A., Amici, F., Arroyo-Garcia, B., Asghari, N., Pardo, G. B., Zhang, Z., Chumacero, J. P., Dzabatou, A., Eirdosh, D., Hanisch, S., Herrnsdorf, T., Hovehne, T., Junker, A., Kanngiesser, P. & Larens, F. V. & 29 others, Mahmoud, S., Masaquiza, S., Masato, I., Maulany, R. I., Meng, T., Mutlu, K., Ngakan, P. O., Peközer, E., Petrović, L., Rehatalanit, M. C., Piscayanti, K. S., Pope-Caldwell, S., Sandoval Sernaque, M. I., Shishala, D., Sportelli, D., Stengelin, R., Stodulka, T., Striegler, B., Sun, W., Sunderarajan, J., Tempelmann, S., Thajib, F., Thiede, N., Tjizao, D., Useb, L., Woidich, L., Weyrowitz, J., Haun, D. & Liebal, K., Feb 2026, In: Journal of Environmental Psychology. 109, 102861.

    Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

    Open Access
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    5 Downloads (Pure)

  • EVApeCognition: An 18-Year Dataset of Great Ape Cognition

    Sánchez-Amaro, A., Ebel van Wijk, S. J., Molenaar, C., Abuova, A., Mujica-Manrique, L., Leisterer-Peoples, S. M., Beheim, B., Maurits, L., Albiach-Serrano, A., Allritz, M., Altınok, N., Amici, F., Auersperg, A. M. I., Aureli, F., Bandini, E., Barth, J., Benziad, L., Bläsing, B. E., Bohn, M. & Bourjade, M. & 88 others, Bräuer, J., Broihanne, M. H., Brosnan, S. F., Bueno-Guerra, N., Bugnyar, T., Buttelmann, D., Buttelmann, F., Cacchione, T., Carpenter, M., Colmenares, F., Crockford, C., Cronin, K. A., de las Heras, Á., De Marco, A., DeTroy, S. E., Dufour, V., Duguid, S., Dunbar, R. I. M., Eckert, J., Engelmann, J. M., Fagot, J., Fischer, J., Forss, S. I. F., Funk, M., Gergely, G., Greenberg, J. R., Großmann, J., Grüneisen, S., Halina, M., Hanus, D., Heilbronner, S. R., Heintz, C., Hepach, R., Herrmann, E., Hirata, S., Hribar, A., Janzen, G., Kaminski, J., Kanngiesser, P., Kano, F., Kirchhofer, K. C., Knofe, H., Kopp, K. S., Krupenye, C., Laumer, I. B., Levinson, S. C., Liszkowski, U., Manrique, H. M., Martin-Ordas, G., McEwen, E. S., Moore, R. T., Munar, E., Nadal, M., Nawroth, C., Nolte, S., Pelé, M., Potì, P., Rakoczy, H., Riedel, J., Romain, A., Rossano, F., Russell, Y. I., Sabbatini, G., Schäfer, M., Scheumann, M., Schmelz, M., Schmid, B., Schmitt, V., Sebastián-Enesco, C., Seed, A. M., Suda-King, C., Tauzin, T., Tempelmann, S., Tennie, C., Truppa, V., Uher, J., Vaish, A., J.C. van Leeuwen, E., Visalberghi, E. M., Völter, C. J., Vonau, V., Wascher, C. A. F., Wittig, R. M., Wolf, W., Tomasello, M., Liebal, K., Call, J. & Haun, D. B. M., 9 Apr 2026, In: Scientific data. 13, 1, 805.

    Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

    Open Access
    File
    1 Downloads (Pure)

  • Overcoming the dyadic default in research on child development

    Stengelin, R., Kanngiesser, P. & Milward, S., 28 Jan 2026, In: Child Development Perspectives. 20, 2, p. 115-122 8 p., aadaf015.

    Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

    Open Access
    File
    3 Downloads (Pure)
View all 52 research outputs