Dr. Hannah White completed her undergraduate and doctoral training at the University of Kentucky and joined the Behavioral Neuroscience faculty at UMSL in 2020.
She currently studies cognitive and social development using an interdisciplinary approach which incorporates behavioral, physiological, and survey methodologies. Although her major focus is in infancy, she takes a lifespan approach to development and has worked with children and adults as well.
Dr. White’s research interests fall into three major categories:
Social development:
What types of socially relevant information (e.g., emotions, sex, species) are infants sensitive to?
How early in life do gender-differences in social processing emerge and what role does parent socialization play in this effect?
Cognitive development:
Is average fixation duration a stable, efficient, and systematic way to examine cognitive development in infancy and adulthood?
Do infants’ preferences for novel objects follow basic principles of behavioral economics (i.e., are they transitive, logical, and stable)?
The Role of Context:
Do physiological (basal cortisol) and contextual (home environment) factors explain individual differences in cognitive development?
How do parent and infant behaviors interact to predict the stability of the home environment and what impact does that have on parent and infant stress?
