Cognitive Development Lab
2014 – 2017
Research Assistant — studying how infants learn language and recognize objects from everyday experience.
As a Research Assistant in Indiana University's Cognitive Development Lab — the group behind the "Babies, Bodies, & Machines" research program in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences — I helped investigate a deceptively simple question: how do infants learn so much, so fast, from ordinary daily life? The lab's premise is that the answer hides in everyday moments — eating breakfast, chasing the dog, playing with toys — where babies are constantly, quietly learning.
To study learning from a baby's point of view, the lab fits infants (aged 1–24 months) with lightweight head-mounted cameras that record egocentric, first-person video and synchronized audio as they go about their days at home. I supported this work — contributing to data collection and the meticulous, frame-by-frame coding behind studies of early language and visual object recognition. It was a lesson in treating the messy, first-person stream of a child's experience as data worth taking seriously.
“Working alongside world-class researchers taught me about teamwork and professional habits; I discovered the thrill of investigating the unknown; but most importantly, I gained a whole new perspective on what it means to be human.”
That foundation — curiosity, careful observation, and respect for each individual's experience — is the throughline to the UX research I do today: the same instinct to understand people by paying close attention to the ordinary details of how they actually live, work, and learn.