Allison Fitch

Dr. Allison Fitch is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at the College of Liberal Arts, Rochester Institute of Technology. She holds a PhD in Developmental and Brain Sciences from the University of Massachusetts Boston and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Boston University. Her research focuses on developmental cognitive neuroscience, particularly the interplay between visual cognitive systems and language acquisition in infants and toddlers, with special attention to deaf children acquiring American Sign Language (ASL). She teaches courses such as Cognitive Psychology, Developmental Psychology, and Research Methods in Psychology, and leads the Perception & Acquisition of Words (PAW) Lab at RIT.

Dr. Fitch's work emphasizes understanding how joint attention mechanisms influence language development and the relationship between early language experiences and low-level visual attention processes. Her recent scholarship explores cross-linguistic input patterns (Japanese/English comparison), ASD-related cognitive functioning, and ASL acquisition dynamics using advanced methodologies like human simulation paradigms. She has published extensively in Developmental Science, Cognitive Science, and Infant Behavior and Development.

Teaching responsibilities include advanced courses like Graduate Cognition and Psychology Laboratory Research, reflecting her commitment to training future researchers. Her lab investigates language acquisition in English, ASL, and bilingual children, combining behavioral experiments with neurodevelopmental perspectives. Current research themes include visual attention allocation in deaf learners and the role of social context in early word learning.