Department of Psychology

Biography:

Keywords: Infant perception and cognition, face perception, early experience and development, developmental cognitive neuroscience, event-related potentials (ERPs)

Following the completion of my B.Sc. in Biology and Psychology at McMaster University and my M.A. in Developmental Psychology at Queen’s University, I received my PhD in Child Psychology from the Institute of Child Development at the University of Minnesota in 2007. Subsequently, I completed postdoctoral training in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I was delighted to join the Department of Psychology at Ryerson as an Assistant Professor in August, 2009.

The overarching goal of my research program is to understand the mechanisms that underlie the development of social perception in both typical and atypical populations. My research combines behavioural methods and tools from cognitive neuroscience (specifically, event-related potentials – ERPs) to investigate the psychological and neural underpinnings of various aspects of face perception throughout development, with a particular focus on infancy and the role that early visual experience plays in driving developmental change. Although much of my research examines developing populations (i.e., infants and young children), I also conduct studies with adults to more precisely characterize the neural representation of faces in the mature system.

Some of my current research questions include:

• What strategies do children use to recognize faces with which they are familiar vs. faces with which they are unfamiliar?
• How does impoverished early experience affect face perception and its neural correlates later in childhood?
• How do the neural correlates of emotion perception change over the first year of life, and how do these changes relate to infants’ developing understanding of others’ emotions?
• How specific are adults’ neural representations of faces and face-like objects? How malleable are adults’ face perception skills?

My teaching interests include introductory courses in Psychology, Developmental Psychology, and Biological Psychology, as well as advanced courses in Cognitive Development, Socioemotional Development, Infancy, and Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience.

Selected Publications:

Moulson, M. C., Westerlund, A., Fox, N. A., Zeanah, C. H., & Nelson, C. A. (2009). The effects of early experience on face recognition: An event-related potential study of institutionalized children in Romania. Child Development, 80, 1039-1056.

Moulson, M. C., Fox, N. A., Zeanah, C. H., & Nelson, C. A. (2009). Early adverse experiences and the neurobiology of facial emotion processing. Developmental Psychology, 45, 17-30.

Leppänen, J. M., Moulson, M. C., Vogel-Farley, V. K., & Nelson, C. A. (2007). An ERP study of emotional face processing in the adult and infant brain. Child Development, 78, 232-245.

Nelson, C. A., Moulson, M. C., & Richmond, J. (2006). How neuroscience informs the study of cognitive development. Human Development, 49, 260-272.

Sabbagh, M. A., Moulson, M. C., & Harkness, K. L. (2004). Neural correlates of mental state decoding in human adults: An event-related potential study. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 16, 415-426.