In short, my research concerns affect (feeling) and cognition (thinking) in children and adults. The human mind is incredibly complex, and its development during childhood even more so. Psychological scientists like myself often divide the mind up into building blocks like "attention" and "short-term memory". This allows us to dig deeply into one specific topic, and to develop models of how it works. While this is incredibly important for our understanding of the mind, it is also important to occasionally zoom out to investigate how all the different building blocks interact with each other.

In my lab, we're like a broken camera: constantly zooming in and out of topics. Our main interest is how children develop cognitive and affective traits, and how they impact each other. On the cognitive end, we investigate how people organise their search, and how short-term memories come to be encoded. On the affective end, we use eye movement recordings to research how human's process threatening or disgusting information. While this all seems to be a bit disjointed, no single psychological trait can be understood in isolation. Hence, we use the basic work summed up here to inform research on how the constellation of traits comes to be, how traits shape each other, and how their development is impacted by the wider environment (e.g. through socioeconomic adversity).

To support our research, and the wider scientific community, we do quite a bit of methodological work. For example, we developed software for cognitive assessments, easy eye tracking in Python, and attention tracking in web-based experiments. We have also written on timing in online experiments, statistical power in cluster analyses, and a on using magnetoencephalography (MEG) in children. Finally, we published textbooks on programming for people in experimental psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and related fields.