Faculty & Staff

Institute Scientists | Students | Research & Institute Staff | Telephone & Email Directory

Institute Scientists

The Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences houses a multidisciplinary, international team of scientists. In addition, faculty from many University of Washington departments, and from institutions around the world, collaborate on specific research projects in conjunction with Institute scientists. Below are brief biographical sketches of the Institute's Co-Directors, faculty, and postdoctoral fellows.

Co-Directors

Dr. Kuhl is a faculty member in the Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences at the University of Washington. She is one of the world's leading authorities on language development and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her research on language played a pivotal role in demonstrating how early experience alters brain mechanisms. Her brain imaging research on adults is reshaping scientists' views of critical periods in learning. The work has broad implications for psychology, biology, linguistics, education, neuroscience, engineering and artificial intelligence.

Dr. Meltzoff holds the Job and Gertrud Tamaki Endowed Chair and is a member of the Department of Psychology at the University of Washington. He also serves as the Head of Developmental Psychology Program. A graduate of Harvard University, with a doctorate from Oxford University, he is an internationally renowned expert on cognitive and social development in infants and children. His discoveries about infant imitation revolutionized our understanding of early memory and brain development. His research on the effects that television viewing has on infants helped shape policy and practice. Dr. Meltzoff's 20 years of research on young children has had a far-reaching impact on cognitive- and neuroscience, artificial intelligence, early education, and public policy on child care.

Faculty & Visiting Scientists

Dr. Atance is a developmental psychologist at the University of Ottawa, and is working with Dr. Meltzoff. Her primary area of interest is the development of future thinking in preschool-aged children. Scientists have discovered a lot about childrens memory for the past, but almost nothing is known about childrens understanding of the future. Dr. Atance is currently running a series of studies that explores childrens ability to think about and anticipate future states of the self, as well as the types of situations that may cause these states to arise. Of particular interest is the point in development when children are able to think about a future state that differs from their current one (e.g., anticipating being cold although one is currently hot). Childrens ability to contemplate such temporal aspects of their selves has implications for cognitive development theories, as well as for how parents and teachers can best talk with preschoolers about planning for the future (such as a trip to the park or what will happen after the child is picked up from preschool)

Dr. Atance is also interested in the development of theory of mind skills, and more specifically how such skills may be related to other aspects of young childrens cognitive development.

Daniel Bernstein, Ph.D.

Dr. Bernstein received his Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Simon Fraser University in Canada. He is currently an Affiliate Assistant Professor, combining cognitive and perceptual science with developmental science in a line of collaborative studies with Geoffrey Loftus (Cognitive science), Andrew Meltzoff and Cristina Atance (Developmental science). One set of studies investigates the relationship between theory of mind and hindsight bias — when privileged knowing biases one's understanding of one's own or another's naive knowledge. Another line of studies investigates the development of perceptual interference — when exposure to degraded forms of a stimulus interfere with one's ability to identify the stimulus. In these studies, 3- to 5-year-old children and college students complete the identical task, thus permitting a direct comparison of performance between preschool children and adults.

Jean Decety, Ph.D.

Dr. Jean Decety was a Visiting Professor at the University of Washington Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences (2001-2005), where he headed the Social Cognitive Neuroscience Lab. In the 2005-2006 academic year he joined the faculty at the University of Chicago. Before coming to the Institute, he was a senior scientist and head of the research program on the Neurophysiology of Intentionality at INSERM, the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research. He is an internationally recognized expert in cognitive neuroscience, functional brain imaging (positron emission tomography (PET), and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)). His recent research focuses on the neural correlates of intersubjectivity, empathy, and theory of mind.

Katherine Demuth, Ph.D.

Dr. Demuth received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from Indiana University, and was a postdoctoral fellow in Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently Professor of Cognitive & Linguistic Sciences at Brown University, where she directs the Child Language Lab. She is especially interested in the contributions of both biological and environmental factors to the process of language learning. Much of her work has examined preschoolers' language development across languages and cultures, providing a unique window into normative processes of language learning. Her sabbatical at I-LABS will be spent learning more about neuro-imaging techniques that can be used with children.

Waka Fujisaki, Ph.D.

Dr. Fujisaki received her Ph. D. in psychology from Ochanomizu University in Japan. She is currently a Research Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science and a Visiting Scientist at both the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences, and NTT Communication Science Laboratories. Before coming to the Institute, she worked as a postdoctoral researcher at NTT Communication Science Laboratories with Shin'ya Nishida, Makio Kashino & Shinsuke Shimojo. Her research interests center around the long-term and short-term plasticity of auditory and cross-modal (auditory, visual, and tactile) systems. Her current research with Dr. Patricia Kuhl examines the link between speech perception and speech production on the second language acquisition.

Colleen Huebner, Ph.D., M.P.H.

In addition to being a member of the Institute, Dr. Huebner is an Associate Professor in the UW School of Public Health and Community Medicine, where she serves as Director of the Maternal and Child Health Leadership Training program. In recognition of her library-based programs for parents and young children, she has been nominated by President Bush to the National Commission on Libraries and Information Science. Dr. Huebner has published research on Dialogic Reading, an intervention program for promoting language and emergent literacy skills in 2- and 3-year-olds. Her current research compares the efficacy of three different instructional methods for delivering Dialogic Reading instruction to parents of young children in a mixed-income, rural community sample.

Dr. Imada is a Research Professor in the UW Department of Speech & Hearing Sciences and head of the Language Neuroimaging Lab at the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences. For the past 26 years, he has conducted research on human information-processing mechanisms from a psychological and engineering point of view and on artificial intelligence from a human-science point of view for Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation (NTT) in Tokyo. In Japan, he was one of the first researchers to study human auditory and visual information-processing in the brain using magnetoencephalography (MEG), a cutting-edge neuroimaging technique. The focus of his research is the use of completely non-invasive neuroimaging methods, such as MEG and fMRI, to investigate infant acquisition of higher-order brain functions, such as cognition and language, in their very early stages.

Dr. Moon is an Affiliate Associate Professor in the Department of Speech and Hearing Sciences in addition to her appointment as Professor of Psychology at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma. Her primary research interest is the effect of very early experience on the perception of speech sounds and voice recognition, and her laboratory is in the mother/baby care unit at Madigan Army Medical Center in Tacoma. Dr. Moon is co-founder of the International Perinatal Brain and Behavior Network.

Dr. Repacholi is a developmental psychologist and an Associate Professor in UW Department of Psychology whose laboratory is housed at the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences. She received a B. Psych. and a Master's degree in Clinical Psychology from the University of Western Australia, and a Ph. D. from the University of California-Berkeley. She has a broad interest in children's early social-cognitive and social-emotional development. Her most recent research centers on infants' responsiveness to, and understanding of, other people's emotional states. She has also published research papers on topics including theory of mind, attachment, children's gender-typed beliefs and behavior, and the ontogeny of human disgust responses.

Dr. Silven was a Visiting Scientist at the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences in 2006. She is a Docent in Developmental and Educational Psychology at both the University of Turku and the University of Helsinki. Before coming to the Institute she worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Academy of Finland at the University of Tampere. In the early 1990’s, she became among the first researchers in the world to study the developmental relationships between early parent-child interaction, language acquisition, and (pre)literacy skills from infancy to school age. She has also conducted longitudinal studies on children’s theory of mind development and attachment relationships in families. Her current research with Dr. Patricia Kuhl focuses on early speech perception and vocabulary growth in children growing up in mono- and bilingual homes.

Dr. Sommerville is an assistant professor in the UW Department of Psychology. She received her BSc from the University of Toronto, and her PhD from the University of Chicago. Dr. Sommerville's research interests center around early cognitive development, in particular, how infants and preschoolers represent their own and other's actions. Her current research projects include work on the development of problem-solving abilities in infancy and infants' ability to understand the goal-directed nature of simple action sequences. She is also investigating preschool children's memory for their own actions and the actions of others in the context of joint activity.

Postdoctoral Fellows