Many feats of human development are known to depend on experience. And yet, our theories of experience-dependent development suffer from a striking empirical oversight: the path from human newborn to toddler is not filled with researcher-designed experiences. Traditional doses and distributions used to test hypotheses about learning in the lab may or may not align with the detailed properties of everyday experiences. Because sensory histories shape emerging skills, we must faithfully model these parameters for well-specified theories of how repetition, variability, and memory dynamics matter for building knowledge. To the extent that "the universe according to researchers" mismatches "the universe according to babies", scholars may be building theories that are inadequate for explaining the natural wonder that is human development. So, in my lab, we use infant-friendly wearable sensors to capture infants' everyday sights and sounds at home. We aim to model young infants' everyday visual, linguistic, and musical ecologies in order to build theories of development that address the opportunities and challenges of real input encountered by real learners. Please see my lab's website for information on current projects.

Dr. Fausey is not accepting new graduate students for Fall 2025.

Selected publications:

de Barbaro, K., & Fausey, C.M. (2022). Ten lessons about infants' everyday experiences. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 31(1), 28-33. doi: 10.1177/09637214211059536

Mendoza, J.K., & Fausey, C.M. (2022). Everyday parameters for episode-to-episode dynamics in the daily music of infancy. Cognitive Science, 46(8), e13178. doi: 10.111/cogs.13178

Mendoza, J.K., & Fausey, C.M. (2021). Everday  music in infancy. Developmental Science, 24(6), e13122. doi: 10.1111/desc. 13122

Fausey, C.M., Jayaraman, S., & Smith, L.B. (2016). From faces to hands: Changing visual input in the first two years. Cognition, 152, 101-107. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2016.03.005