Justine Hoch, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Psychology and Human Development
VKC Member
Overview of Interests
Infants learn through exploration -- they actively generate information about people, places, and things and about their own bodies and skills. Dr. Hoch studies exploration through the lens of motor development because new motor skills offer infants new opportunities to interact with the environment and new ways to learn. Because crawling and walking provide infants with unprecedented access to the larger world, she uses locomotion as a model system to study the development of exploratory behavior. Dr. Hoch's research program aims to: (1) characterize the factors that shape exploratory behavior in real time and over development; (2) understand how exploration facilitates learning. She approaches these complementary aims from an ecological perspective where the fundamental unit of analysis is the behavior of an individual in a body embedded in a physical and social environment. Dr. Hoch examines real-time and developmental processes using detailed behavioral video coding, head-mounted eye tracking, video-based motion tracking, gait analysis, computational modeling, and robotic simulation.
Website
https://peabody.vanderbilt.edu/bio/?pid=justine-hoch