Developmental  Research Orientation

• Developmental psychology is fascinating because it is, most fundamentally, about the stories of individual lives.
• Age matters - a lot.
• There are many ways to understand life stories, but I favor an evidence-based scientific approach that includes both typical and unusual life trajectories.
• The longitudinal study of individuals, despite its inherent difficulty and expense, is the best way to describe and understand the paths that lives take.
• Cross-sectional studies aren't as good as longitudinal ones, but are a lot better than nothing.
• Because most early development unfolds in homes and living rooms, where it is largely invisible to researchers, we need to recruit parents as our collaborators and give them good tools.
• We are developing parent-friendly measures of key development milestones
• Longitudinally collected diary data allows us to describe the developmental paths of large numbers of infants and toddlers at a relatively low cost.
• These descriptions allow us to identify both typical and unusual trajectories.
• By following the children as they develop we will see whether and how variations in early trajectories predict or constrain later outcomes.
  

Standing without support

Infant Reaching

Toddler with Umbrella

Attention Task