Aaron Beckner

Biography

I am a cognitive developmental psychologist with interdisciplinary training in vision science, neuroscience, and quantitative methods. I earned my PhD in psychology at the University of California, Davis, and completed postdoctoral research at the University of South Carolina and subsequently at Cornell University, where I spent three years as a postdoctoral researcher.

I currently teach Introduction to Psychological Science and Developmental Psychology. My research focuses on the development of basic cognitive processes in early childhood—a period of dramatic growth and profound change that lays the foundation for later learning and development. I am interested in how young children transform the landscape of their perceptual experiences into opportunities for learning. I use behavioral observation, eye-tracking, and computerized tasks to examine the development of cognitive processes such as attention, memory, and spatial reasoning, as well as how young children use these skills in social interactions and real-world contexts. More recently, I have begun to integrate computational methods and machine learning to analyze large-scale, real-world data and better understand how people value and prioritize early childhood learning experiences.