Swapnaa Jayaraman

Scientist, New York University

Resume | CV


My life runs on two tracks: I am a research scientist by day and a community advocate by night, and I love finding ways to bring the two tracks together. I enjoy taking on challenges - the bigger, the better - and I thrive in environments where uncertainty is the norm. I enjoy an opportunity to understand a problem in depth, work with smart and empathetic collaborators on ideas, and see the solution through to the finish. This page describes some of my recent endeavors.


Research

The perceptual experiences of infants in the first few years of life begin a remarkable process of knowledge acquisition and set up the neural processes that support that development. My research aims to understand the structure in early visual environments and the role of that structure in visual development. I study the visual properties of early environments at three levels: low level properties, object-level attributes, temporal characteristics. I ask how the properties change with age, how they vary across individuals (and culture) and how they relate to development of visual sensitivities measured through neurophysiological and behavioral responses.


Characterizing early visual environments

The central project of my post-doctoral training at the Cognitive Development laboratory at Indiana University was the collection of a large corpus of infant-perspective videos: over 600 hours of video rendering 70 million frames from 131 infants aged 1 to 24 months of age. To do this, I use a head camera system that is easy for parents to use at home to record the scenes from their infant’s perspective. The data collected through this project is rich, multi-dimensional, and of broad interest, and it has immense scope for addressing a variety of unresolved questions about early visual experience.


Understanding role of experience on development

My hypothesis is that the protracted development of infant perceptual and cognitive abilities is primarily determined by the co-occurring changes in developmental experiences. I employ electroencephalography – event-related potentials in particular – to study the neural correlates of the changing input.

Teaching

The physical, biological, and psychological world is complex with many interacting causes. My teaching goals – in all courses – are directed to helping students break apart the deep regularities that “just seem to be” to understand their components and underlying mechanisms. I want them to understand that this is a task that needs to be done for any phenomenon or issue, I want them to understand how it is done and the importance of analysis and experimentation, and I want them to understand that the job of delving deep into mechanism is never done. Throughout my teaching I invite students to build hypotheses, provide them the tools and evidence to shape their framework, and encourage them to arrive at conclusions.



Courses taught
at Indiana University, Bloomington
  • Human Factors and Ergonomics
  • Developmental Neuroscience
  • Supervised Research
Courses assisted
at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
  • Cognitive Ergonomics
  • Human Error and Complex System Failures