Nicole Sahrling
Team Manager | Psychology | Stanford University
Hello! I'm the Team Manager of the Scaffolding of Cognition Team (PI: Dr. Cameron Ellis) at Stanford University. I'm curious how infants can form such rich conceptual representations so effortlessly from their early visual and linguistic experiences.
You can email me at sahrling [at] stanford [dot] edu
Research
My research examines how infants and young children form early concepts, and the ways in which language and vision interact to support these representations. I am broadly interested in conceptual development, awake infant fMRI, visual perception and attention, high-dimensional data analysis, and interested in how vision-language models might help us better understand the emergence of cognitive representations.
Previously, I was an Honors Thesis Student in the Visual Learning Lab (PI: Dr. Bria Long) where I worked closely Dr. AJ Haskins examining the semantic overlap between young children's descriptions and drawings of concepts throughout development using Vision-Language models like CLIP.
I also spent two wonderful quarters working with Bill Pepe in the Social Cognition and Learning Lab (PI: Dr. Lindsey Powell), where I first began thinking about the origins of social concepts in infancy.
Feel free to reach out to me, happy to connect!