Dr Sarah Gerson
(she/her)

Reader

: Media commentator
: Available for postgraduate supervision

My research focuses on how infants and young children come to understand and engage in the social world in which they live.

My research explores the active role infants and children play in creating experiences that help them understand the world around them. Specifically, I have previously examined the role active experience, observational experience, and comparison processes play in recognizing goals at the origins of action understanding. More recently, I have built upon this foundation to examine how young children engage in cooperative actions with others. I use a variety of measures to address these topics, including looking times, eyetracking, imitation and other overt behavioral measures, electroencephalography (EEG), and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS).

Date
Type

2025

Frewin, K. L., Gerson, S. A., Vanderwert, R. E. and Gambi, C. 2025. Parent-reported relations between vocabulary and motor development in infancy: Differences between verbs and nouns. Infancy 30(1), article number: e12638. (10.1111/infa.12638)

2024

Keating, J., Hashmi, S., Vanderwert, R. E., Davies, R. M., Jones, C. R. G. and Gerson, S. A. 2024. Embracing neurodiversity in doll play: Investigating neural and language correlates of doll play in a neurodiverse sample. European Journal of Neuroscience 60(3), pp. 4097-4114. (10.1111/ejn.16144)
Howard, L. H., Waters, F. F. and Gerson, S. A. 2024. Social models influence visual perspective taking in memory. Journal of Cognitive Psychology 36(6), pp. 709-719. (10.1080/20445911.2024.2365464)
Keating, J., Purcell, C., Gerson, S. A., Vanderwert, R. E. and Jones, C. R. G. 2024. Exploring the presence and impact of sensory differences in children with Developmental Coordination Disorder. Research in Developmental Disabilities 148, article number: 104714. (10.1016/j.ridd.2024.104714)

2020

Hashmi, S., Vanderwert, R. E., Price, H. A. and Gerson, S. A. 2020. Exploring the benefits of doll play through neuroscience. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 14, article number: 560176. (10.3389/fnhum.2020.560176)
Yuniarto, L. S., Gerson, S. A. and Seed, A. M. 2020. Better all by myself: Gaining personal experience, not watching others, improves 3-year-olds’ performance in a causal trap-task. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 194, article number: 104792. (10.1016/j.jecp.2019.104792)
Gerson, S. and Stapel, J. 2020. Manual motor development. In: Benson, J. B. ed. Encyclopedia of Infant and Early Childhood Development. Elsevier, pp. 281-289., (10.1016/B978-0-12-809324-5.23625-0)

2019

Gerson, S., Weinstein, N., Paulmann, S. and Gattis, M. 2019. Infants attend longer to controlling versus supportive directive speech. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 187, article number: 104654. (10.1016/j.jecp.2019.06.007)
Monroy, C. D., Gerson, S. A., Dominguez-Martinez, E., Kaduk, K., Hunnius, S. and Reid, V. 2019. Sensitivity to structure in action sequences: An infant event-related potential study. Neuropsychologia 126, pp. 92-101. (10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2017.05.007)
Frewin, K., McEwen, E., Gerson, S., Bekkering, H. and Hunnius, S. 2019. What’s going on in babies’ brains when they learn to do something?. Frontiers for Young Minds 7, article number: 44. (10.3389/frym.2019.00044)
Monroy, C., Meyer, M., Schroer, L., Gerson, S. and Hunnius, S. 2019. The infant motor system predicts actions based on visual statistical learning. NeuroImage 185, pp. 947-954. (10.1016/j.neuroimage.2017.12.016)
Foltz, A., Williams, C., Gerson, S., Reynolds, D., Pogoda, S., Begum, T. and Walton, S. 2019. Game developers’ approaches to communicating climate change. Frontiers in Communication 4, article number: 28. (10.3389/fcomm.2019.00028)

2018

Monroy, C. D., Gerson, S. and Hunnius, S. 2018. Translating visual information into action predictions: Statistical learning in action and non-action contexts. Memory & Cognition 46(4), pp. 600-613. (10.3758/s13421-018-0788-6)

2017

Monroy, C., Gerson, S. and Hunnius, S. 2017. Infants' motor proficiency and statistical learning for actions. Frontiers in Psychology 8, article number: 2174. (10.3389/fpsyg.2017.02174)
Monroy, C., Meyer, M., Gerson, S. and Hunnius, S. 2017. Statistical learning in social action contexts. Plos One, article number: e0177261. (10.1371/journal.pone.0177261)
Monroy, C., Gerson, S. and Hunnius, S. 2017. Toddlers' action prediction: statistical learning of continuous action sequences. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 157, pp. 14-28. (10.1016/j.jecp.2016.12.004)
Gerson, S. A., Meyer, M., Hunnius, S. and Bekkering, H. 2017. Unravelling the contributions of motor experience and conceptual knowledge in action perception: A training study. Scientific Reports 7, article number: 46761. (10.1038/srep46761)
Gerson, S. A., Bekkering, H. and Hunnius, S. 2017. Do you do as I do?: Young toddlers prefer and copy toy choices of similarly acting others. Infancy 22(1), pp. 5-22. (10.1111/infa.12142)

2016

Gerson, S. A., Simpson, E. A. and Paukner, A. 2016. Drivers of social cognitive development in human and non-human primate infants.. In: Sommerville, J. and Decety, J. eds. Social Cognition: Development Across the Life Span. Frontiers of Developmental Science New York: Routledge
Gerson, S., Bekkering, H. and Hunnius, S. 2016. Social context influences planning ahead in three-year-olds. Cognitive Development 40, pp. 120-131. (10.1016/j.cogdev.2016.08.010)

2015

Ehrlich, K. B., Gerson, S., Vanderwert, R., Cannon, E. N. and Fox, N. A. 2015. Hypervigilance to rejecting stimuli in rejection sensitive individuals: behavioral and neurocognitive evidence. Personality and Individual Differences 85, pp. 7-12. (10.1016/j.paid.2015.04.023)
Gerson, S. A., Bekkering, H. and Hunnius, S. 2015. Short-term motor training, but not observational training, alters neurocognitive mechanisms of action processing in infancy. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 27(6), pp. 1207-1214. (10.1162/jocn_a_00774)
Gerson, S., Schiavio, A., Timmers, R. and Hunnius, S. 2015. Active drumming experience increases infants' sensitivity to audiovisual synchrony during observed drumming actions. PLoS ONE 10(6), article number: e0130960. (10.1371/journal.pone.0130960)
Gerson, S., Mahajan, N., Sommerville, J. A., Matz, L. and Woodward, A. L. 2015. Shifting goals: effects of active and observational experience on infants' understanding of higher order goals. Frontiers in Psychology 6(310) (10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00310)

2014

Woodward, A. L. and Gerson, S. 2014. Mirroring and the development of action understanding. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B - Biological Sciences 369(1644), article number: 20130181. (10.1098/rstb.2013.0181)
Gerson, S. 2014. Sharing and comparing: how comparing shared goals broadens goal understanding in development. Child Development Perspectives 8(1), pp. 24-29. (10.1111/cdep.12056)
Gerson, S. A. and Woodward, A. L. 2014. Learning from their own actions: the unique effect of producing actions on infants' action understanding. Child Development 85(1), pp. 264-277. (10.1111/cdev.12115)
Gerson, S. and Woodward, A. L. 2014. The joint role of trained, untrained, and observed actions at the origins of goal recognition. Infant Behavior and Development 37(1), pp. 94-104. (10.1016/j.infbeh.2013.12.013)
Gerson, S. and Woodward, A. L. 2014. Labels facilitate infants' comparison of action goals. Journal of Cognition and Development 15(2), pp. 197-212. (10.1080/15248372.2013.777842)

2013

Gerson, S. A. and Woodward, A. L. 2013. The goal trumps the means: highlighting goals is more beneficial than highlighting means in means-end training. Infancy 18(2), pp. 289-302. (10.1111/j.1532-7078.2012.00112.x)

2012

Gerson, S. A. and Woodward, A. 2012. A claw is like my hand: comparison supports goal analysis in infants. Cognition 122(2), pp. 181-192. (10.1016/j.cognition.2011.10.014)

2009

Woodward, A., Sommerville, J., Gerson, S., Henderson, A. and Buresh, J. 2009. The emergence of intention attribution in infancy. In: Ross, B. ed. The Psychology of Learning and Motivation. Academic Press, pp. 187-222.
Gerson, S. and Woodward, A. 2009. Building intentional action knowledge with one's hands. In: Johnson, S. ed. Neoconstructivism: The New Science of Cognitive Development. Oxford University Press, pp. 599-635.

Most of my research is conducted within the Cardiff University Centre for Human Developmental Science. Our research group, Tiny to Tots, benefits from relationships with local families who volunteer their time for research and collaborations with Techniquest.

From learning to tie one’s shoes to perfecting the art of tango, observing and understanding others’ actions is critical to human success throughout development. Understanding what other people are doing when they act is foundational to the development of language, cognition, and culture, and it is essential to seamlessly interacting in the social world.

In my research, I recruit diverse methodological techniques and innovative paradigms in order to examine a central question in social-cognitive development: How do infants and young children come to learn about and from others' actions? Although action understanding is essential throughout human development, studying its origins is especially important because it allows us to examine the interplay between inborn abilities and formative experiences.

I began by examining mechanisms underlying the origins of intention understanding (see, for example, Gerson & Woodward, 2013, 2014). That is, I investigated how young infants develop an understanding of the goals underlying others’ actions and, in particular, how their own experience producing actions contributes to this understanding. Building on this work, I have since conducted research addressing how infants come to understand, copy, and predict actions that they have never previously performed themselves (e.g., Gerson & Woodward, 2012, 2013). In this work, I emphasise the role comparison (i.e., analogy) processes play in the generalisation of action understanding. I hypothesise that comparing familiar and novel actions helps infants and children understand the goals of novel actions (Gerson, 2014; Gerson & Woodward, 2009; Woodward & Gerson, 2014). For example, if I had never seen someone using an electric mixer to stir batter, but I had previously stirred batter with a spoon, I could understand the goal of the person using the electric mixer via comparison to my previous experience sitrring with a spoon.

In ongoing research, I am exploring the neural correlates of action understanding and social processing using both electroencephalography (EEG; Gerson et al., 2015; Meyer, Gerson, et al., 2017; Monroy, Gerson, et al., 2017) and functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS; Hashmi, Vanderwert, Price, & Gerson, 2020).

Across my work, I use a variety of behavioural and neuroimaging methods to address one common theme: how infants and young children come to understand and interact with other humans. When we learn to tie our shoes, we learn more than just the mechanics of the action. We also learn about the goal of our sister’s action when she ties her shoes and, via comparison, the goal of our mother when she ties a bow in our sister’s hair. Understanding the goals underlying these basic actions is an important foundation for social, cognitive, and cultural development.

Funding

2019-2023 - Industry Partnership Funding (±£250,000)
2020-2021 - ISSF Cross-Disciplinary Award Wellcome Trust (co-I; ±£50,000)
2020-2021 - Waterloo Child Development Fund (co-I; ±£55,000)
2020 - Cardiff University Research Infrastructure Fund (co-I; ±£100,00)
2019-2022/2020-2023 - ESRC-DTP Collaborative Studentships (± £60,000)
2017-2018 - Welsh Crucible Grant (co-I)
2015 - Royal Society Research Grant (£15,000)

Research collaborators

Recent Publicity

Coverage of doll play findings across Europe with reach of over 400 million (October, 2020). Examples include: Independent; Mirror; Forbes; Daily Mail

Gerson, S.A., & van Schaik, J. (March, 2018). Are kids coding more than their parents did? https://www.primotoys.com/blog/

Gerson, S.A., Gattis, M., & Weinstein, N. (August, 2017). Before babies understand words, they understand tones of voice. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/before-babies-understand-words-they-understand-tones-of- voice-81978

Can how we talk to babies influence their development? (August, 2017). ITV report and television broadcast. http://www.itv.com/news/wales/2017-08-11/can-how-we-talk-to-babies-influence-their-development/

BBC Radio Wales (August, 2017). Voices motivate babies.

I am module coordinator and teach in the second year Developmental Psychology (PS2011) module. I also teach Developmental Psychology as part of the MSc Conversion (PST721). I have previously run the Foundations of Psychology (PS0001) module. I also teach academic tutorials and practicals and supervise student projects and personal tutees. I supervise undergraduate interns via the CUROP and SPRint schemes most summers.

I have previously taught or TA’d for Developmental Research Methods, Cognitive Development, Statistics, Cognitive Psychology, Developmental Psychology, and Cross-Cultural Psychology.

Undergraduate education

Illinois State University, summa laude.

Postgraduate education

University of Maryland, College Park.

Honours and awards

2017 - Welsh Crucible
2012 - University of Maryland Distinguished Dissertation Award
2011 - Ann G. Wylie Dissertation Fellowship
2011 - International Conference Student Support Award
2010 - Rovereto Workshop on Cognition and Evolution Travel Grant
2009 - Janet W. Johnson Student Grant for Travel and Professional Development
2009 - Society for Research on Child Development Student Travel Award
2008 - Janet W. Johnson Summer Fellowship for the Study of Developmental Psychology
2008 - Goldhaber Travel Grant
2008 - Graduate Student Award to the International Conference on Infant Studies
2006-08 - Psychology Department Block Fellowship
2002-06 - Presidential Scholarship at Illinois State University
2005 - Robert G. Bone Scholarship
2002-06 - Presidential Scholarship at Illinois State University.

Professional memberships

Society for Research in Child Development
International Congress on Infant Studies
Cognitive Development Society

Academic positions

2015-2016 - Lecturer, University of St Andrews, School of Psychology and Neuroscience
2011-2014 - Postdoctoral Researcher, Radboud University Nijmegen.

Committees and reviewing

Ongoing Editorial Board Member: Infancy

Ongoing Editorial Board Member: Scientific Reports- Nature

Ongoing Editorial Board Member: Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

2019 Review Panel Member: Cognitive Development Society

Panel: Perception, Action, Attention, & Cognitive Control

2017 Review Panel Member: International Conference on Infant Studies

Panel: Cognitive Development

2016 Conference organizing committee for the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology Annual Meeting (August 2016)

2016 Review Panel Member: Society for Research in Child Development

Panel 1: Attention, Learning, & Memory

2015 Review Panel Member: International Conference on Infant Studies

Panel 5: Attention, Memory, & Learning

If you are interested in applying for a PhD, or for further information regarding my postgraduate research, please contact me directly, or submit a formal application.

Current supervision

Amy Hughes

Research student

Kelsey Frewin