Meet the lab!
Dr. Lisa Oakes, Principal Investigator
Dr. Oakes received her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in 1991 and was a faculty member in the Department of Psychology at the University of Iowa from 1991 to 2006. She joined the University of California Davis community in 2006 and is a Professor of Psychology.
Post-Doctoral Scholar
Brianna Hunter
Dr. Brianna Hunter earned her Ph.D in Psychological Sciences from Tulane University in 2022. Prior to her doctoral work, she earned a B.S. in Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience from the University of Florida and a M.S. in Psychological Sciences from Tulane University. Brianna is broadly interested in the reciprocal relationship between attention and learning during infancy. In the Infant Cognition Lab, Brianna uses eye tracking and computational modeling approaches to understand how infants’ unique experiences shape the way they visually explore naturalistic scenes.
Graduate Students
Christian Nelson
Christian graduated Magna Cum Laude with her B.A. in Psychology from California State University, Dominguez Hills in 2019. She received several prestigious awards, including 2019 Undergraduate Psychology Student of the Year and was also a distinguished member of the MARC USTAR program, which promotes diversity in research.
Christian was inspired to pursue her Ph.D. in visual cognition while conducting eye-tracking studies with Dr. Paul Zak at the Claremont Graduate University. Additionally, a year-long internship with Dr. Helen Lavretsky at UCLA provided her with a significant research background in cognitive development across the lifespan. These experiences, along with her work in the Design Your Life course with Dr. Heather Butler at CSUDH were vital in shaping her passion for developmental research from a visual cognition perspective.
She joined the Oakes lab in 2019 as a graduate student and studies the ways in which parents scaffold infant cognitive development through joint attention during play. Additional projects include a study into the ways in which infants visually learn about the world around them and learn to interact with their environment.
Shannon Klotz
Shannon earned her B.A. in Cognitive Neuroscience from Scripps College in May 2019 and joined the Infant Cognition Lab in June. While in Southern California, she was a member of Dr. Michael Spezio's Laboratory for Inquiry into Valuation and Emotion (LIVE Lab) and studied Theory of Mind using EEG. There, Shannon explicitly modeled mental representations during both the development and presence of stable cooperation via communication outcomes. This allowed for better understanding of the sophistication, or degree of mental coordination, involved in individuals' social perception and reasoning. In Fall 2021, she started her Ph.D. at UC Davis with the Infant Cognition Lab -- combining her passions for infant cognition and technologies that study mechanisms of the human mind, brain, and behavior.
Erim Kızıldere
Erim graduated summa cum laude with his B.A. in Psychology and Economics and earned his M.A. in Cognitive Psychology from Koç University, Istanbul. Inspired by how play develops shared spheres among humans, invokes happiness and imagination, and provides unique experiences to learn and reason about the world, Erim is interested in play with three main focuses: 1) how parent-infant interactions during play provides learning opportunities to infants to reason and learn about the world, 2) how parents tailor their input based on their infants’ developmental levels, and 3) how play is connected with children's socio-cognitive abilities.
During his master’s at the Language and Cognition Lab under the supervision of Dr. Tilbe Göksun, Erim was a coordinator of a longitudinal project and researched the bidirectional relations between parents’ sound symbolic and pretense input during play and infants’ vocabulary knowledge and pretend play skills. As a newcomer Ph.D. student to Infant Cognition Lab, Erim is currently interested in how the interaction of infants’ development in motor and language skills and parental input shapes infants’ learning in naturalistic play settings. Besides his academic pursuits, Erim loves playing role-play games, writing short narratives, running regularly, and getting to know new friends and languages.
Van Pham
Van received her B.A. in Psychology and B.S. in Neurobiology, Physiology, and Behavior from UC Davis in June 2021. During her undergraduate studies, she worked at UC Davis Health as an intern in the Accelerated Access Unit and the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU), where she worked with adults and kids. After her internship at UC Davis Health, Van explored the research aspect of psychology and became an Undergraduate Research Assistant at the Infant Cognition Lab. Her research assistant experience inspired her to stay at the Infant Cognition Lab and apply to be a Master's student in Child Development (in the Human Development Graduate Group), where she continued to work under Dr. Lisa Oakes as her major professor. During her graduate studies, Van hopes to explore various aspects of visual cognition, attention, and memory in infants and young children.
Junior Specialist / Lab Manager
Amanda Soeth
Amanda graduated from UC Davis in 2024 with a B.S. in Cognitive Science with an emphasis in Neuroscience. During her undergraduate studies, she worked as a research assistant in the Brain and Social Cognition Lab under Dr. Lindsay Bowman. There she began to explore her interests in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience particularly in the development of empathy throughout preschool. This led Amanda to pursue a dual Junior Specialist position at the Brain and Social Cognition and Infant Cognition Labs to get a broader understanding of social and psychological development through infancy and early childhood.