| Les Cohen is Professor of Psychology in
the Developmental
area and the Cognition
and Perception area at UT. He also is the founding editor
of the journal Infancy. This journal is published by
the International
Society on Infant Studies. Dr. Cohen was elected President
of ISIS for the years 2006 to 2008.
Dr. Cohen received his Ph.D. from UCLA
in Developmental Psychology. His primary research interests
are in perception, memory, and cognition of infants. In general
he and his students in the Infant Cognition Laboratory have
been examining how infants process and integrate visual and
auditory information from their environment. Most research projects
involve some variation of a visual habituation paradigm which
Dr. Cohen developed for use in infant research. In this paradigm
infants' looking times are recorded while they are repeatedly
shown either a single stimulus or multiple stimuli and are then
tested with familiar versus novel stimuli. Most of the stimuli
are actual events generated through sophisticated computer animation
techniques or videotaped and then presented to the infants.
Recently the laboratory has also developed Habit 2000, a multipurpose
software program for testing infant perception and cognition.
Habit 2000 is currently being used by more than 30 infant laboratories
around the world.
Some of the specific research questions being
investigated by Dr. Cohen are:
1. How do infants come to understand concepts and categories?
2. What principles govern infants' early language?
3. How do infants process causal relations and other visual
events?
4. At what age do infants perceive both the form and function
of objects with which they interact?
Recent Publications and Conference
Presentations
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