Education

• Ph.D., Psychology, The University of Texas at Austin, 1991
• B. A., Psychology, The University of California, San Diego, 1985

About

In addition to her academic appointment in the Department of Psychology, Lisa Oakes is a faculty member with the UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain. She is a member of several professional organizations, including the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Sciences, the Cognitive Development Society, the Cognitive Science Society, the International Congress of Infant Studies, and the Society for Research in Child Development. Her book Developmental Cascades: Building the Infant Mind, written with David Rakison, was published in 2019 by Oxford University Press and was awarded the 2022 Eleanor Maccoby Book Award in Developmental Psychology, by APA Division. She is also currenlty the editor in chief of Infancy, the flagship journal of the International Congress of Infant Studies.

Research Focus

Professor Oakes studies the origins and early development of mental abilities in infancy. In general, this work is motivated by the perspective that cognitive abilities work together, and that our understanding of cognitive development in infancy is enriched by studying the interaction of multiple systems. Ongoing research examines the relation between daily experience (e.g., having a pet in the home) and infants' learning in the lab, the interaction between attentional abilities and visual short-term memory, and infants' learning of dynamic events.

Lab

Infant Cognition Lab (Oakes)

Select Recent Publications

Oakes, L.M., Hayes, T.R., Klotz, S.M., Pomaranski, K.I., & Henderson, J.M. (2024). The role of local meaning in infants’ fixations of natural scenes. Infancy, 29, 284-298 https://doi.org/10.1111/infa.12582.

Beckner, A.G., Arnold, C.D., Bragg, M.G., Caswell, B.L., Chen, Z., Cox, Katherine, DeBolt, M.C., George, M., Maleta, K., Stewart, C., Oakes, L.M., & Prado, E. (2023). Examining Infants’ Visual Paired Comparison Performance in the US and Rural Malawi, Developmental Science, e13439. https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.1343

DeBolt, M.C., Mitsven, S.G., Pomaranski, K.I., Cantrell, L.M., Luck, S.J., & Oakes, L.M. (2023). A new Perspective on the role of physical salience in visual search: Graded effect of salience on infants’ attention. Developmental Psychology, 59, 326-343. DOI:10.1037/dev0001460

DeBolt, M.C., & Oakes, L.M. (2023). The impact of face masks on infants’ attention to and learning of faces: An eye tracking study. Infancy, 28, 71-92. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/infa.12516.

Oakes, L. M. (2023). The cascading development of visual attention in infancy: Learning to look and looking to learn. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 32, 410-417. https://doi.org/10.1177/09637214231178744

Kiat, J.E., Luck, S.J, Beckner, A.G., Hayes, T.R., Pomaranski, K.I., Henderson, J.M., & Oakes, L.M. (2021). Linking patterns of infant eye movements to a neural network model of the ventral stream using representational similarity analysis. Developmental Science, e13155. Repository: https://osf.io/ehg82/

Pomaranski, K. I., Hayes, T. R., Kwon, M.-K., Henderson, J. M., & Oakes, L. M. (2021). Developmental changes in natural scene viewing in infancy. Developmental Psychology, 57(7), 1025–1041. https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0001020Repositories: https://osf.io/5j4ht/ and https://nyu.databrary.org/volume/1131

DeBolt, M. C., Rhemtulla, M., & Oakes, L. M. (2020). Robust data and power in infant research: A case study of the effect of number of infants and number of trials in visual preference procedures. Infancy, 25, 393-419. Repository: https://osf.io/ayju3/

Beckner, A.G., Cantrell, L.M., DeBolt, M.C., Martinez, M., Luck, S.J., & Oakes, L.M. (2020). Visual short-term memory for overtly attended objects during infancy. Infancy, 25, 347-370. Repository: https://osf.io/6w5kq/

Hoemann, K. Wu, R., LoBue, V., Oakes, L.M., Xu, F., & Barrett, L.F. (2020). Developing an understanding of emotion categories: Lessons from objects. Trends in Cognitive Science, 24, 39-51.

Teaching

Professor Oakes teaches Developmental Psychology and Infant Development.

Awards

Professor Oakes has been selected as a fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Association for Psychological Science. She also received the Eleanor Maccoby Book Award in Developmental Psychology in 2022. She received the UC Davis Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Mentoring Undergraduate Research in 2024 and a Graduate Program Advising and Mentoring Award in 2023.