Lisa Oakes

Professor Lisa Oakes is a leading scholar in developmental psychology and visual cognition at the University of California, Davis, affiliated with the Center for Mind and Brain. Her work focuses on infant cognitive development, particularly visual attention, memory, and categorization processes. She employs eye-tracking technology to investigate how everyday experiences—such as exposure to faces or pets—influence these processes. Oakes emphasizes cross-cultural and globalized research, addressing WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) sample limitations, and advocates for methodological rigor in infant studies.

Her research spans topics including visual short-term memory, face processing, dynamic event learning, and the impact of nutritional interventions (e.g., egg supplementation in Malawi) on child development. She has authored influential books like Developmental Cascades: Building the Infant Mind (2019) and received the 2022 Eleanor Maccoby Book Award from APA for this work. Oakes collaborates internationally, leading projects such as the ManyBabies consortium to enhance reproducibility in developmental science.

Her lab’s studies often integrate computational models (e.g., Graph-Based Visual Saliency) with empirical data to explore infant visual perception. Recent work addresses pandemic-related effects of face masks on social learning and develops innovative methods for assessing spatial cognition in young children. Oakes also prioritizes global representation in research, advocating for diverse participant pools to improve the generalizability of developmental findings.