Research
I investigate attentional and learning processes, from a developmental perspective, with an emphasis of the first years of life. I study these high-level cognitive processes as well as the interactions between them in two main lines of research. In the first line of research, I study the influence of the emotional content of stimuli on attentional capture: Seeing or hearing threat-relevant stimuli in our environment can grab our attention from an early age, even in the absence of any experience or knowledge about the potential dangerousness of these stimuli.
In my second line of research, I am interested in our ability to incidentally and spontaneously extract regularities present in the environment, often referred to as statistical learning. This ability is crucial given the richness and the complexity of the world. It is especially relevant in infancy since it allows babies to identify meaningful units and build predictions regarding their environment.
I am sharing a permanent position between the Faculties of Psychology – where I am responsible for the ULBabyLab (CO3, CRCN), and Medicine – as part of the Laboratoire de Cartographie Fonctionnelle du Cerveau (LCFC). This provides me with a rich research environment and allows me to combine the use of behavioral and neurophysiological techniques (EEG, MEG) in my studies.
Research Topics
- Implicit learning and statistical learning
- Modulation of attention through learning and emotion in infants and young children
