Department of Psychology

Biography:

Keywords: Infancy and early childhood, cognitive and social-cognitive development, social learning, social reasoning

I received my PhD in developmental psychology from the University of Virginia in 2007. After graduate school, I completed postdoctoral appointments at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of British Columbia. I was delighted to join the Department of Psychology at Ryerson University as an assistant professor in 2010.

My research centers on cognitive and social-cognitive development in infancy and early childhood. The primary focus of my research is on how infants and young children learn about and learn from others. More specifically, I am interested in (1) early social reasoning based on patterns of evidence in others’ behavior and (2) young children’s selective learning from different information sources. A second focus of my research is on how young children understand and reason about counterfactuals such as make-believe.

My teaching interests include undergraduate courses in introductory and developmental psychology, as well as advanced courses in infancy, cognitive development, and early social cognition.

Selected Publications:

Ma, L., & Xu, F. (in press). Preverbal infants infer intentional agents from the perception of regularity. Developmental Psychology.

Ma, L., & Woolley, J. D. (in press). Young children’s sensitivity to speaker gender when learning from others.  Journal of Cognition and Development.

Ma, L., & Xu, F. (2011). Young children’s use of statistical sampling evidence to infer the subjectivity of preferences. Cognition, 120, 403-411.

Ma, L., & Ganea, P. A. (2010). Dealing with conflicting information: Young children’s reliance on what they see versus what they are told. Developmental Science, 13, 151-160.

Ma, L., & Lillard, A. S. (2006). Where is the real cheese? Young children’s ability to discriminate between real and pretend acts. Child Development, 77, 1762-1777.