Hanako Yoshida

Dr. Hanako Yoshida is a Professor at the University of Houston, affiliated with the Department of Psychology in the College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences. She serves as Director of the Cognitive Development Lab, focusing on early attention and language development. Her research bridges developmental psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and behavioral neuroscience to study language acquisition, social attention, and multimodal learning.

• Education: Ph.D. from Indiana University
• Affiliations: Cognitive Development Lab, University of Houston

Dr. Yoshida’s research explores how infants develop attentional mechanisms through object manipulation, parental scaffolding, and social coordination. She investigates bilingual learning experiences, gaze distribution patterns, and executive function development, with a strong emphasis on autism spectrum disorders and cross-linguistic comparisons.

From 2022-2024, her lab has published on head-mounted eye-tracking in ASD research, saliency-driven attention, and parental strategies for attentional development. Earlier work from 2017-2022 examined executive function, verb learning, and attentional highlighting in bilingual and monolingual children, often using computational analysis of infant visual environments.

Her publications span journals like Journal of Neurodevelopmental Disorders, Acta Psychologica, and Frontiers in Psychology. Collaborative projects frequently involve international studies (US, Argentina, Vietnam) and interdisciplinary methodologies including head cameras, egocentric video analysis, and behavioral experiments.

• Key Research Themes:
  • Attentional mechanisms in early learning
  • Parental influence on gaze behavior
  • Bilingualism effects on cognition
  • Autism diagnostic methodologies
  • Executive function across cultures
  • Development of social and cognitive ontologies