Developmental
Area Description (St. George)
The members of the developmental area share a broad interest in accounting for changes in thought, feeling, and behavior across the life span. Each explores a different facet of human development, but with a common commitment to appreciating its formative context -- material, social, and symbolic.
Daphna Buchsbaum's research investigates the complex interplay between social and causal reasoning: How
children, adults and non-human animals use social information to help them understand the physical world. In addition to behavioral experiments with children and dogs, her lab uses probabilistic computational models to help address some of these questions.
Alison Chasteen's research examines stereotyping and prejudice with respect to age. In particular, she focuses on how people's self-concepts regarding their future aged selves influence age-based prejudice.
Amy Finn's research investigates how maturational changes in cognitive and neural function influence learning. She focuses on how domain-general aspects of development — especially changes in memory systems — influence
learning across domains, including language acquisition, skill learning, and educational achievement.
Joan Grusec's (emerita) research examines how different strategies, styles, and beliefs about parenting impact the socialization of children. This includes assessing of the uniformity and variability of these relations across ethnocultural groups.
Charles Helwig explores the development of moral understanding, especially as it applies to judgments about social issues and institutions. He is currently involved in collaborative, cross-cultural research looking at children’s conceptions of democratic rights and freedoms.
Meg Schlichting studies how the brain supports the formation, modification, and use of knowledge from a developmental perspective. Her research employs cognitive neuroscience techniques (functional and structural MRI) to understand how neural maturation gives rise to developmental differences in the ability to remember and reason.
Christina Starmans studies social and moral cognition across the lifespan. Her research focuses on questions at the intersection of psychology and philosophy including how young children and adults reason about topics such as the self, morality, ownership, fairness, and knowledge.
Romin Tafarodi’s research is concerned with the cultural character of self and identity. His most recent work examines acculturative identity change as it is reflected in narrative structure, especially with regard to the integration of challenging experiences into the life story.
Developmental Science Interest Group (DIG): DIG brings together University of Toronto faculty, post-doctoral fellows, and graduate students to present and discuss research in developmental science.
Research at the University of Toronto Scarborough
Research at the University of Toronto Mississauga