Before joining the Hope College faculty in 2020, Dr. Lauren K. Slone was a postdoctoral fellow at Indiana University. Her research examines how children learn so much, so fast, in their first years of life. Specifically, she and her students use methods like tracking a child’s gaze as they interact with a parent or play with toys to understand what the world looks and sounds like from a child’s perspective and how children learn from these unique experiences. Her teaching responsibilities include Developmental Psychology and Research Methods.

Areas of Expertise

Lauren specializes in eye-tracking research with young children and their parents, including both remote eye-tracking (e.g., tracking where a child looks on a computer screen) and head-mounted eye-tracking (e.g., tracking where a baby looks as they play with toys and move around their environment). These methods yield high-density data that help us understand both the learning problems faced by young children (e.g., just how ambiguous is it from the infants’ perspective what the label “dog” refers to?), and how the statistical structure of their early visual and auditory environments help children learn about words, objects and people.

Education

• Postdoctoral Fellow, psychology, Indiana University, 2020
• Ph.D., psychology, University of California, Los Angeles, 2015
• M.A., psychology, University of California, Los Angeles, 2011
• B.S., biological sciences and psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, 2009

Honors, Grants & Awards

• NRSA Postdoctoral Fellowship (F32) from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), 2017–2018
• Provost’s Travel Award for Women in Science from Indiana University in 2016, 2017 and 2019
• Young Scientist Travel Award from Indiana University’s Cognitive Science Program and the National Science Foundation (NSF), 2016
• Millard Madsen Dissertation Award for Developmental Students from UCLA, 2015
• Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation (NSF), 2012–2015
• Graduate Summer Research Fellowship, UCLA, 2011
• Jacob K. Javits Graduate Research Fellowship, 2010–2012
• Graduate Research Mentorship Fellowship, UCLA, 2010
• Senior Honors Thesis Grant, Carnegie Mellon University, 2009
• Small Undergraduate Research Grant, Carnegie Mellon University, 2008 and 2009

Selected Publications:

• “Self-generated variability in object images predicts vocabulary growth,” with L.B. Smith & C. Yu, Developmental Science, e12816, 2019
• “Gaze in action: Head-mounted eye tracking of children’s dynamic visual attention during naturalistic behavior,” with D.H. Abney, J.I. Borjon, C. Chen,  J.M. Franchak, D. Pearcy, C. Suarez-Rivera, T.L. Xu, Y. Zhang, L.B. Smith, and C. Yu, Journal of Visualized Experiments, 141, e58496, 2018
• “When learning goes beyond statistics: Infants represent visual sequences in terms of chunks,” with S.P. Johnson, Cognition, 178, 92-102, 2018
• “Object exploration facilitates 4-month-olds' mental rotation performance,” with D.S. Moore and S.P. Johnson, PLoS ONE, 13(8), e0200468, 2018
• “A developmental approach to machine learning?” with L.B. Smith, Frontiers in Psychology, 8, 2124, 2017
• “Consider the category: The effect of spacing depends on individual learning histories,” with C.M. Sandhofer, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 159, 34-49, 2017
• “Infants' statistical learning: 2- and 5-month-olds' segmentation of continuous visual sequences,” with S.P. Johnson, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 133, 47-56, 2015
• “Statistical learning across development: Flexible yet constrained,” with H. Vlach, and S.P. Johnson, Frontiers in Language Sciences, 3, 598, 2013
• “Does causal action facilitate causal perception in infants younger than 6 months of age?” with  D.H. Rakison, Developmental Science, 15, 43-53, 2012

View a full list of Dr. Slone’s publications on her Google Scholar profile.

Outside the College

When she’s not teaching, writing or conducting research with students, Lauren can be found spending time with her husband, Jeff, and her 2-year-old daughter, Savannah. Lauren enjoys hiking, dancing, soaking up the summer sun and thrift shopping.