Research

We explore the social and cognitive development in interactive action paradigms, using measures of eye movement as well as EEG recordings. Employing a comparative approach, we carry out observational and experimental studies with toddlers of different socio-cultural backgrounds, as well as inter-species comparisons with our nearest primate relatives, the chimpanzees.

The research at our lab focuses on (selection); Complete list of publications

• Cognitive and social origins of gestural communication in the first year of life
  
  • Liszkowski, U. & Rüther, J. (2021). Ontogenetic Origins of Infant Pointing. In: Lock, Sinha, Gontier (eds). Oxford Handbook of Human Symbolic Evolution.Online Publlication Date: Apr 2021, DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198813781.013.31
  • Liszkowski, U. (2018). Emergence of shared reference and shared minds in infancy. Current Opinion in Psychology, 23, 26-29.
  • Ger, E., Altinok, N., Liszkowski, U., Küntay, A. (2018). Development of Infant Pointing from 10 to 12 months: The Role of Relevant Caregiver Responsiveness. Infancy 7(5). 708-729.

• Mu-desynchronization in the EEG following action and gesture observation
  
  • Karthik, S., Parise, E., Liszkowski, U. (2019). Social Factors Influence the Meaning of the ‘Back-of-Hand’ Gesture in Adults and Infants: EEG Study. Poster presented at the Society for Research in Child Development Biennial Meeting, March 2019, Baltimore, USA.

• Communication-induced object expectations and object permanence
  
  • Pätzold, W. & Liszkowski, U. (2019). Pupillometry reveals communication‐induced object expectations in 12‐ but not 8‐months‐old infants. Developmental Science. https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.12832
  • Pätzold, W. & Liszkowski, U. (under review). Gamma-oscillations as a signature of object representations following occlusion and pointing events in 10- and 12-months-old infants.
  • Liszkowski, U., & Ramenzoni, V. C. (2015). Pointing to Nothing? Empty Places Prime Infants' Attention to Absent Objects. Infancy, 20(4), 433-444.

• DFG Researcg Group ( https://crossing-project.de/ ): Development and neural correlates of mental state understanding (‘Theory of Mind’)

• Gestural communication of infants and apes
  
  • Goot, M. H., Tomasello, M., & Liszkowski, U. (2014). Differences in the nonverbal requests of great apes and human infants. Child Development, 85(2), 444-455.
  • Kersken, V., Gómez, J. C., Liszkowski, U., Soldati, A., & Hobaiter, C. (2018). A gestural repertoire of 1-to 2-year-old human children: in search of the ape gestures. Animal Cognition. 1-19.
  • Liszkowski, U., Schäfer, M., Carpenter, M., & Tomasello, M. (2009). Prelinguistic infants, but not chimpanzees, communicate about absent entities. Psychological Science, 20(5), 654-660.
  • Liszkowski, U. (2014). Two sources of meaning in infant communication: preceding action contexts and act-accompanying characteristics. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B, 369(1651), 20130294.
  • Ramenzoni, V. C., & Liszkowski, U. (2016). The social reach: 8-month-olds reach for unobtainable objects in the presence of another person. Psychological Science, 27(9), 1278-1285.
  • Quantifying sources of variability in infancy research using the infant-directed speech preference The ManyBabies Consortium.

• ManyBabies: Large-scale Replikationsstudien in Zusammenarbeit mit vielen internationalen Laboren zu zentralen Befunden der kognitiven Säuglingsforschung (Leitung: Michael Frank, Stanford University, USA; https://manybabies.github.io/
• The ManyBabies1 Consortium (2020). Quantifying sources of variability in infancy research using the infant-directed speech preference. Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/2515245919900809