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.