Invited Speakers
Invited Plenary Speakers
Krista Byers-Heinlein
Concordia University
Dr. Krista Byers-Heinlein is a Full Professor in the Department of Psychology at Concordia University, where she holds the Concordia University Research Chair in Bilingualism and Open Science and directs the Concordia Infant Research Lab. Her research focuses on infants and children who grow up in bilingual environments. She has made notable discoveries about how very young bilinguals discriminate and differentiate their two languages, how children are able to learn words in two languages to build their vocabularies, and how parents interact with their bilingual children to support their development. She is also active in efforts to improve psychological science, working to improve methods, increase transparency, build large-scale collaborations in the field, and promote equity and inclusion for under-represented groups. Dr. Byers-Heinlein is a founding member of the governing board of the ManyBabies Consortium, which spans 200+ labs across 40+ countries, which has fundamentally changed how developmental research is conducted globally.
Dr. Byers-Heinlein has authored more than 80 peer-reviewed articles in journals such as Psychological Science, Child Development, Developmental Science, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and is co-author of the book, The listening bilingual: Speech perception, comprehension, and bilingualism. Her research has been supported by over 3.7 million dollars CAD in direct costs from granting agencies including from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, les Fonds de recherche de Quebec, and National Institutes of Health. Her research is often featured in print and broadcast media, including Global TV, CBC Radio, Psychology Today, PBS, the Globe and Mail, and the New York Times. Her work has been recognized by numerous awards, including most recently the 2025 Quebec “Rising Star” prize for leadership and scientific excellence.
Abstract
What Bilingual Babies Reveal About How All Children Learn
Bilingual children show remarkable variation—some become fluent in multiple languages while others struggle, despite seemingly similar circumstances. This puzzle illuminates a fundamental challenge in understanding how all children learn. Traditional approaches focus on isolated factors that correlate with developmental outcomes, ranging from age and exposure to family background and culture. Yet these correlations mask the underlying mechanisms that actually drive development. Here, I argue that systems thinking that considers dynamic interactions across system levels is crucial for understanding underlying mechanisms of learning and development. Drawing from experimental, parent-report, and sociolinguistic research on language acquisition in bilingual infants, I show how development emerges from the interplay between maturational factors and experience, and how developmental outcomes depend on alignment across individual, family, and societal levels. What bilingual babies teach us extends far beyond language: successful development in any domain requires understanding the complex web of interacting forces that shape children’s minds.
Lisa Feigenson
Johns Hopkins University
Lisa Feigenson is Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins University. She received her BA from Cornell University (with Elizabeth Spelke) and her PhD from New York University (with Susan Carey). Her work seeks to understand foundational aspects of basic cognition starting in infancy, and how these change with experience. She is a recipient of the Troland Award from the National Academy of Sciences, the Boyd McCandless Early Career Award from APA, and a James S. McDonnell Foundation Scholar Award. She feels fortunate to have been mentored by outstanding and inspiring scientists, and to have been surrounded by brilliant students and colleagues throughout her career.
Abstract
The cradle of curiosity
Curiosity underpins the greatest of human achievements, from exploring the reaches of our solar system to discovering the structure of our own minds. Where does this drive come from? Here I suggest that far from being reliant on language and sophisticated metacognitive skills, curiosity is present from our earliest days. In support of this claim, I discuss work showing that preverbal infants not only experience curiosity but harness it: when babies’ predictions fail to accord with their observations, they look longer, learn more, and produce exploratory behaviors. Critically, their exploration is guided by a desire to explain —long before they have the words to describe what they see, babies seek to understand why things happen as they do. In this sense, the curiosity that emerges in infancy lays the foundation for a lifetime of discovery.
Invited Symposia
Bilingual/Multilingual Development
Viridiana Benitez
Arizona State University
Viridiana Benitez is an Assistant Professor at Arizona State University, where she directs the Learning & Development Lab and co-founded the Early Childhood Cognition Research Group. Her research examines how cognition, context, and experience shape language learning across development. To achieve this, Benitez works with infants, children, and adults from monolingual and multilingual backgrounds. With this research, Benitez aims to identify the factors that promote language learning in children growing up across diverse learning environments. As a bilingual first generation student from an immigrant family, Benitez is also dedicated to expanding access to psychological science for students, families, and communities.
Dina Castro
Boston University
Bio to come
Drew Weatherhead
Dalhousie University
Dr. Drew Weatherhead is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology & Neuroscience at Dalhousie University. Her research investigates the mechanisms of early language acquisition, with a particular focus on sociolinguistic development in infancy and early childhood. Using methods such as eye-tracking and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), she examines how children process accented speech and how social factors—such as speaker race—influence language perception and learning. Her recent work explores how bilingual experience and social context shape early speech processing and lexical development.
Adriana Weisleder
Northwestern University
Adriana Weisleder is an assistant professor in Communication Sciences and Disorders at Northwestern University. Her research investigates early language development in young children from a range of sociocultural backgrounds, with a focus on multilingual learners. She conducts observational and experimental work to investigate both the learning mechanisms and contexts that support language development. An important goal of this work is to contribute to building a more robust evidence base for understanding variability in language development across diverse environments. Her work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, Academic Pediatric Association, and Russell Sage Foundation, among others.
Children’s scientific reasoning
Florencia Anggoro
College of the Holy Cross
Florencia Anggoro is a Professor of Psychology at the College of the Holy Cross. She completed her Ph.D. in cognitive psychology (with a specialization in cognitive science) at Northwestern University, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Chicago and University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research focuses on conceptual development, examining the roles of language, culture, and formal and informal learning experiences in shaping children’s and adults’ concepts. Her recent work has focused on designing and testing cognitive supports for children’s science learning, and the development of children’s beliefs across cultures.
David Menendez
University of California, Santa Cruz
David is an assistant professor of Psychology at the University of California-Santa Cruz. His research examines how people learn concepts in formal and informal settings. He has explored how children learn science concepts through conversations with parents, when and why people change the strategies they use to solve mathematics problems, and how visual representations influence learning and generalization. He is also interested in the role of culture and socialization practices on development, including how participating in cultural rituals shapes children’s conceptual development, and how different communities within the United States think about illness.
Andrew Shtulman
Occidental College
Andrew Shtulman is a Professor of Psychology at Occidental College where he directs the Thinking Lab. Dr. Shtulman studies conceptual development, focusing on the development of intuition, imagination, and reflection. He earned a BA in Psychology from Princeton and a PhD in Psychology from Harvard and is the author of Scienceblind (Basic, 2017) and Learning to Imagine (Harvard, 2023).
Tal Waltzer
University at Albany (State University of New York) & University of California, San Diego
Dr. Tal Waltzer is an assistant professor at the University at Albany (State University of New York). Tal received a PhD in developmental psychology from UC Santa Cruz in 2022 (with Dr. Audun Dahl) and then worked as a postdoctoral fellow at UC San Diego until 2025 (with Dr. Gail Heyman, NSF SPRF-FR# 2104610). Tal’s research examines social experiences in youths’ everyday lives and how they relate to moral development and decision-making in educational contexts.