Welcome to my personal website!  

        I am interested in the development of social perception from an evolutionary perspective, including facial identity and expression recognition.  I examine both species-specific processing mechanisms, as well as within-species individual differences (e.g., sex and age differences) in social and emotional perception.

       I am in my final semester in the Behavioral and Brain Sciences Program doctoral program at the University of Georgia, and plan to graduate in May of 2011.  I received a Bachelor's degree in psychology from the University of Arizona in 2005, and a Master's degree in psychology from the University of Georgia in 2008 (read my Master's Thesis).

        We completed a study in collaboration with Dr. Dorothy Fragaszy's Primate Cognition and Behavior Laboratory and Dr. Janet Frick's UGA Infant Research Laboratory, in which we examined facial identity discrimination and facial expression perception in infants (6- to 12-month-olds) and adults.  We measured whether infants' abilities to recognize faces varies, depending on the species they were viewing (human, monkey, or sheep), and how this changes across the lifespan.  We will be presenting our findings at the SRCD Biennial Meeting this week (PDF of poster).  We also recently published a paper in Infancy in which we show that infants experience perceptual narrowing for non-primate animal faces (Simpson et al., 2010).  My research and teaching interests were recently featured in the Graduate School's Spotlight and in the Association for Psychological Science's The Observer.

        This summer (2011) I will begin a position as a postdoctoral researcher with Dr. Pier Ferrari, at the University of Parma, to study the development of social cognition in macque monkeys.  This work will be carried out in Dr. Steven Suomi's Laboratory of Comparative Ethology, in Poolesville, Maryland.