Dr Marina Bazhydai is the Director of the Active Learning Lab (ALL) at Lancaster University. She holds the Lecturer position at the Department of Psychology and is affiliated with the Infancy and Early Development Group and the Babylab. Prior to completing her PhD in developmental psychology at Lancaster University, she obtained an Ed.M. degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, B.A. and M.A. degrees from Belarus State University, worked as an educator, and held research positions at Harvard and Yale Universities in the USA.
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PhD Students
Didar Karadağ is a final year PhD student. She is broadly interested in how infants and young children actively learn information from their environment and how they transmit information to others around them. Her current research investigates the developmental ontogeny of information transmission behaviour, the type of information that infants and young children prefer to transmit to others, and the underlying motivations that may drive this behaviour. Prior to her doctoral studies at Lancaster University, Didar received her B.A. and M.A. degrees from Boğaziçi University, Turkey. She worked as a research assistant and as a lab manager in several research labs and conducted research on social learning in infancy and preschool years, early communicative roles of speech (infant-directed speech and IDS-based inferences), and the development of social group understanding in early childhood. Didar’s Master’s thesis explored the selectivity in children’s information transmission by focusing on the role of group affiliation of the recipients and the type of information transmitted.
Elena Altmann is a final year PhD student. Her research interests include fundamental mechanisms of infant development such as active exploration, learning and individual characteristics. Ever since working as a student research assistant during her undergraduate studies, she has built her education around psychological research, more specifically such directed at the youngest populations. She followed the University of Amsterdam’s Psychology Research Master programme to further develop her scientific research skills, including more advanced analysis methods, as well as the awareness for and importance of scientific integrity. Her current research concerns infant curiosity. It will focus on allowing infants to choose what they want to explore by using gaze contingent eyetracking methods. This way, she aims to explore if self-directed exploration behaviour is systematic across children and whether there are individual difference in what and how infants wish to explore. Integrating a universal perspective on active exploration with a focus on individual differences in a comprehensive context is crucial for fundamentally understanding a phenomenon and its developmental trajectory.
Malcolm Ka Yu Wong is a second year PhD at Lancaster University with the 1+3 ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council) scholarship from the North West Social Science Doctoral Training Partnership. Malcolm is a recent graduate of the LU holding a BSc and MSc Psychology degree. At ALL, he has been primarily involved in the caregiver curiosity in child development research project, which aims to understand infant caregivers’ intrinsic motivation behind their participation in lab-based research and whether it affects their knowledge of infant development and further curiosity in this topic. Malcolm is also assisting with the curiosity in word learning project which uses a gaze-contingent eye-tracking paradigm. Malcolm has been an active member of the Lancaster Babylab and the Cognition of Social Interaction, CoSI Lab.
MSc Students
Research Assistants
El Smith is in the final year of their BSc Psychology degree. They have been involved in multiple projects since joining the Bablab in July 2023, including testing for a project relating to curiosity driven learning in children 20-23-month-olds. El has also assisted on other projects focusing on language in school age children and listening behaviour in infants. El has a passionate interest in infant development and is interested in pursuing a career in developmental research.
Alumni
Maddy Anderson graduated with the BSc Hons Natural Sciences degree. She was involved with ALL via Psychology Employability Programme (PEP) in 2020-2021 on the project investigating infant curiosity in social learning and was instrumental to developing a novel behavioural coding scheme to apply to naturalistic home video recordings of infant-caregiver interactions. Maddy currently works as a secondary school teacher in Manchester.
Ellie Bradeley graduated with the BSc Psychology degree. She was involved with ALL via Psychology Employability Programme (PEP) in 2020-2021 on the project investigating infant curiosity in social learning. She was instrumental to developing a novel behavioural coding scheme to apply to naturalistic home video recordings of infant-caregiver interactions. Ellie currently works as an Education Mental Health Practitioner.
Freya Hill completed the MSc in Developmental Disorders programme at Lancaster University in 2021. She has a broad interest in infant and child development, particularly with regards to active learning, infant-caregiver interactions and curiosity. She also has a fascination for neurotypical development and worked as an SEN tutor in a specialist college. Freya currently works as an Assistant Clinical Psychologist.
Elena Gkari was a Master’s student in 2020-2021 on the Psychological Research Methods programme at Lancaster University. She also holds a BSc degree in Marketing and Communication from the Athens University of Economics and Business, and has worked in the marketing sector of toy companies and NGOs for the past 5 years. She is interested in how infants explore the world around them through play and what drives their curiosity. She is also interested in investigating how toys are designed and what makes a toy attractive to an infant. As many toy companies nowadays prioritize the production of educational toys, and parents prefer to spend more money on them, Elena’s dissertation aimed to explore how an educational toy can also be attractive to infants and how infant development can be accelerated through play.
Katy Small graduated with a BSc Psychology degree. She has been involved with ALL via Psychology Employability Programme (PEP) in summer 2021, primarily assisting on the project investigating wonder in school age children and teachers.
Emily Dreyer was an MSc student studying for her Developmental Psychology Masters at Lancaster University, previously having completed a BSc in Psychology at Lancaster University. Emily has previously held a position in the Lancaster Babylab via Psychology Employability Programme (PEP) in her second year at university. Emily is interested in pursuing a career in clinical psychology.
Dr. Daphne Barker was a Research Associate at ALL in 2022-2023. She completed her PhD at The University of Manchester and MRC’s Institute of Hearing Research in Nottingham, in the field of auditory neuroscience. She completed a post-doctoral study in auditory neuroscience before moving into the field of children’s language development. She is interested in fair and open science and research that aims to reduce the educational achievement gap between those from privileged backgrounds and those in less privileged circumstances. Daphne’s is currently researching the concept of wonder and curiosity in primary school children.
Charlotte Rothwell was a PhD student, and completed her BSc degree at Lancaster University. Her PhD research investigated how children’s interests and attentional mechanisms affect word learning in autistic children, in comparison to neurotypical children. Charlotte’s work as a Research Assistant at ALL investigated information-seeking, particularly the concept of wonder, in primary school children and teachers. Charlotte has been actively involved with the Babylab since 2016.
Charlotte Thompson was part of ALL in her final year of the BSc Psychology degree. She has been involved with ALL via the Psychology Employability Programme (PEP) in 2022-23, primarily assisting on the project investigating wonder in school age children and teachers. She has an extensive interest in developmental psychology and hopes to work with children in a clinical capacity in the future.
Michelle Kan was part of ALL as a third-year BSc Psychology student. She studied social science for two years before starting this degree. She became involved with ALL via Psychology Employability Programme (PEP) and assisted on a range of research projects.
Amie Suthers completed an Integrated Masters of Psychology degree. She was involved with ALL via Psychology Employability Programme (PEP) between 2021-2023 and assisted on projects related to children’s information transmission.