Professorship for Developmental Psychology: Infancy and Childhood

Prof. Dr. Moritz Daum

Developmental psychology i concerned with the description, explanation, and prediction of human experience and behaviour from the perspective of change over the lifespan.

The Research Unit “Developmental Psychology: Infancy and Childhood” investigates the social-cognitive development of humans. We want to better understand when and how we start to interact with our social environment. To do so, we examine the interplay between verbal and non-verbal representations, the development of actions and their perception, and children’s social-cognitive and communicative abilities in monolingual or multilingual contexts. We further explore the influence of cultural background on social-cognitive development.

We use techniques such as behavioural studies, eye tracking, and electroencephalography. In addition, we developed a smartphone-based developmental diary app, the Pebbles App
(https://www.pebbles-app.com/) that allows caregivers to track the development of their children continuously and longitudinally in four different domains from birth to age 6. With this tool, we aim to identify inter- and intraindividual relations and differences and disentangle the effects of experience, maturation, and their interaction in the development to advance theories about children’s development and increase our understanding of developmental change.

Currently, we have three main research foci (with research group leaders):

Multilingualism and Communication (Dr. Stephanie Wermelinger)
Pebbles App (Dr. Lisa Wagner)
Cognitive & Developmental Neuroscience of Language (Dr. Sebastian Sauppe)