About us

The Cognitive Development Laboratory (CDL) in the Department of Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego, is a group of graduate, undergraduate, and postgraduate research assistants supervised by Prof. Gedeon Deák, who share an interest in the cognitive and development science in infancy and early childhood.

We conduct research on questions related to:

• infant-parent interactions, and social learning in infancy;

• language development including natural language input to infants, and word learning in young children

• cognitive skills in children, including executive functions (e.g., cognitive flexibility & cognitive inhibition), inductive inference (e.g., generalization of category properties; inferring real vs. apparent identities), and social-cognitive judgments

• other project addressing topics including, e.g., neural error response, learning of reward contingencies, and identification of complex auditory events and musical patterns

Our research primarily uses behavioral methods but with our collaborators we sometimes incorporate neuropsychological (EEG) and modeling techniques.