Our Team
Team Members
Principle Investigator
Dr. Stephanie Denison
Stephanie is the director of the Developmental Learning Lab. She studies infant and early childhood cognition, mostly as it relates to how children learn and integrate multiple types of information in their inferences. Current topics of interest in the lab include infant probabilistic reasoning, how children attribute preferences to others, the development of heuristics and biases, how children use probability to infer others’ emotions, the cues that infants use to detect agency, and multi-modal ratio abstraction.
Post-Doctoral Researchers
Dr. Elizabeth Lapidow
Liz is a postdoctoral researcher in the lab. She is interested in how learners seek to figure out the world around them by taking actions and considering possibilities. Her research looks at learning and reasoning about causality and how learners make decisions during exploration.
Lab Coordinators
Katie Martin
Katie recently completed a Bachelor of Knowledge Integration degree (Joint Honours Psychology) here at the University of Waterloo. She is now working as a lab coordinator for the Infant and Child Studies Group. She is interested in how children learn language differently than adults and how individuals may use language differently depending on their environment. When not in the lab she is busy spending time playing sports, camping or reading!
Shaneene Heupel
Shaneene recently completed her MA in Developmental Psychology with the Lab for Infant Development and Language (LIDL) and is now working as a lab coordinator for the Infant and Child Studies Group. She is interested in how disfluencies in speech can affect toddlers’ perceptions of speaker knowledge. When not in the lab she is busy spending time outside, travelling, or doing something creative!
Graduate Students
Claudia Sehl
Claudia Sehl is a PhD candidate co-supervised by Dr. Stephanie Denison from the Developmental Learning Lab and Dr. Ori Friedman from the Child Cognition Lab. Her research focuses on children's intuitions about economic concepts, like cost-benefit analysis, efficiency, waste aversion, and sunk costs.
Nadine Ghanem
Nadine Ghanem is a second year master’s student in the MA Developmental Psychology program, co-supervised by Dr. Heather Henderson and Dr. Stephanie Denison. Her research uses dyadic mobile eye-tracking to examine parent and child problem-solving and joint attention during challenging tasks.
Hailey Pawsey
Hailey completed her Bachelor of Arts in Honours Psychology with a minor in Political Science. She is finishing her MASc in Developmental and Communication Science and will start her PhD this fall under the co-supervision of Dr. Stephanie Denison and Dr. Ori Friedman. Her research focuses on children's ability to reason with close counterfactuals and children's understanding of skill and luck.
Candice Rubie
Candice is a second-year master’s student in the Developmental Learning Lab. Her research looks at how children develop and use the Approximate Number System to estimate quantities, as well as how to give more effective failure feedback.
Honours Thesis Students
Sundus Ismaeil
Sundus is in the Life Sciences Honours Psychology program. In the lab she is working on her Honours Thesis, examining how children understand time and knowledge.
Mo Pabla
Mo is in her last term of a Bachelor in Science in Honours Psychology minoring in Philosophy and Biology. She is currently an Honours Thesis student co-supervised by Dr. Dension and Dr. Friedman where she is investigating the sunk cost bias.
Marissa Lepp Burroughs
Codey Tsz Ting Yuen
Research Assistants/Directed Studies
Noa Morton-Sydorak
Noa Morton-Sydorak is a 4th year student in Honours Psychology. She has been a research assistant in DLL since 2021. Her current research goals are developmental emotion regulation and resilience, developmental thought processes and stress coping strategies.
Thuvaraka Mahenthiran
Thuvaraka is in her fourth year of Bsc Honors Psychology minoring in Biology. She's currently working on her Directed Studies project, assisting graduate student Nadine on joint attention and parent-child interaction.
Darryl Ku
Darryl is an undergraduate research assistant working under master’s student Nadine Ghanem's project on parent and child problem-solving interactions.
Jasmi Ravendran
Jasmi is in her 3b term in the Health Science program. She is a research assistant in the lab and is currently supporting master's student Nadine Ghanem's project on parent and child problem-solving interactions.