Assistant Professor in Psychology
now residing at...
Department of Psychology, Lehman College
sarah.shuwairi AT lehman.cuny.edu
Lehman College, The City University of New York
Department of Psychology * 113 Gillet Hall * 250 Bedford Park Blvd. West * Bronx, NY 10468
Research Interests:
I am interested in how infants represent real, solid objects and their position in space as well as how these mechanisms operate in early development. For example, how do we come to understand that objects in the real world are coherent and continuous in 3-dimensions? What are the visual features that infants register, and how do they integrate these cues to recognize objects? How do certain types of perceptual information affect infants' oculomotor and manual exploration of visual displays?
One line of research is investigating how we perceive objects as continuous and complete despite various types of occlusion. We examine the effects of training as well as the constraints of memory on the formation of object representations in early infancy. We typically measure anticipatory saccades (using the ASL eye-tracker) to the location of re-emergence during dynamic object occlusion events. These anticipatory eye movements may serve as an index of object knowledge in young infants, and we can use this information to gauge improvements in object knowledge with age and experience. We have complemented this research using a functional MRI task with adults aimed at identifying cognitive and neural mechanisms subserving our ability to keep track of moving objects undergoing occlusion.
The second line of research examines whether very young infants can differentiate between pictures of 3-dimensionally possible and impossible objects (see cube figure above). To accomplish this, I am measuring looking times and patterns of eye movements (using the Tobii eye-tracker) to evaluate exactly where infants allocate their attentional resources when viewing picture displays of structurally coherent versus incoherent objects. Initial results indicate that very young infants appear to make use of several kinds of pictorial depth cues present in pictures of objects and rely on this information to differentiate between possible and impossible figures.
The Baby Lab at Lehman College
Recent Publications
Shuwairi, S. M. (2009). Preference for impossible figures in 4-month-old infants. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 104, 115-123. [PDF]
Johnson, S. P. & Shuwairi, S. M. (2009). Learning and memory facilitate predictive tracking in 4-month-olds. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 102, 122-130. [PDF]
Shuwairi, S. M., Curtis, C. E., & Johnson, S. P. (2007). Neural substrates of dynamic object occlusion. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 19, 1275-1285.
Shuwairi, S. M., Albert, M. K., & Johnson, S. P. (2007). Discrimination of possible and impossible objects in infancy. Psychological Science, 18, 303-307. [PDF]
Johnson, S. P., Amso, D., Frank, M. C., & Shuwairi, S. M. (2007). Perceptual development in infancy as the foundation of event perception. In T. F. Shipley & J. Zacks (Eds.), Understanding events: How humans see, represent, and act on events. New York: Oxford University Press.
Holopigian,
K., Shuwairi, S. M., Greenstein, V. C., Winn, B. J., Zhang, X., Carr, R. E., & Hood, D. C. (2005). Multifocal visual evoked potentials to cone specific stimuli
in patients with retinitis pigmentosa (RP).
Shuwairi,
S. M., Cronin-Golomb, A., O'Donnell, B. F., & McCarley, R. W. (2002). Color discrimination
in schizophrenia. Schizophrenia Research, 55, 197-204. [PDF]
Balcer, L. J., Baier,
M. L., Pelak, V. S., Fox, R. J., Shuwairi, S. M., Galetta, S. L., Cutter, G. R., & Maguire, M. G.
(2000). New low contrast vision charts: Reliability and test
characteristics in patients with MS. Multiple Sclerosis, 6, 163-171.
Psychology Study Offers New Insights Into Visual Ability of Infants (NYU Today)
http://agutie.homestead.com/files/escher/escher_illusion.html