Amanda Woodward is Professor in the Department of Psychology and the Program in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science at the University of Maryland.  She received her Ph.D. in Psychology from Stanford University in 1992, and worked as a post doctoral fellow at Cornell University and a faculty member at the University of Chicago before joining the faculty at Maryland in 2005. Her research has been recognized by several awards including the John Merck Fund Young Scholars Award (1994), the APA Boyd McCandless Award (2000) and the James McKeen Cattell Sabbatical Fellowship (2003-2004). She is a fellow in Division 7 of the American Psychological Association and in the Association for Psychological Science.  Dr. Woodward serves as the area chair for the Developmental Psychology graduate program.

I recently graduated from Carnegie Mellon University in Psychology with a minor in Industrial Design. I am particularly interested in the role perception of energy in a causal scene has on infants' categorization of animate and inanimate objects.

I recently graduated from Illinois State University, and I am a graduate student in the Developmental Psychology program here at the University of Maryland. I first became interested in the development of children in high school, and since then my interest has grown deeper and my focus narrower. My research interests are in the area of infant cognition, and more specifically, intentional understanding and social knowledge.

I graduated from the University of Pittsburgh with a Bphil in Psychology and Anthropology. I have had the pleasure of working in many developmental labs including Pittsburgh's Early Social Development Lab, the Infant Communications Lab, the Anna Freud Centre in London, and the Georgetown Early Learning Project. I am excited to be joining the Maryland Infant Studies team as a graduate student. I hope to investigate how children understand agency and social interactions, and how this understanding could aid in cognitive processes such as memory.

I graduated  from William & Mary with a BA in philosophy and literary & cultural studies, and began the PhD program in philosophy here at Maryland in 2007.  I am interested in many aspects of cognitive science, including social cognition, self-knowledge, and causal reasoning.  I am particularly interested in how these aspects of the mind develop throughout infancy and childhood.  Here at the Maryland Infant Studies Lab, I hope to investigate how infants reason about causal events, and the role that infants' understanding of agency plays in their causal reasoning.

I am interested in the development of intentional understanding from infancy through early childhood. I am specifically interested in what aspects of an action most inform the attribution of a goal or intention. Does the type of agent matter ( e.g., a person, an animal, a ball, etc.)? Is there something about the way an agent moves that provides information about its goals? And, how does the child's own experiences contribute to their action understanding (i.e ., knowledge about their own abilities, knowledge about others)? In the lab I am currently using visual attention, behavioral, and eye tracking measures to explore these questions.