I am an associate professor in developmental psychology at the Psychology research institute. My research is best summarized as the psychometrics of learning and development. My core interest is in characterizing the building blocks of the human cognitive architecture, such as concepts, rules, attention. These building blocks are shaped during learning and development, for example in category learning, in implicit learning and rule learning. Across different experimental paradigms and age groups I develop state-of-the-art analytical approaches to further understanding of their results.
One important analytical approach concerns the detection of sudden changes in (developmental) processes through hidden Markov models. In recent years I developed methods for better characterizing of eye-tracking data and understanding the attentional processes underlying those data.
Recent research mostly focuses on infants through the Manybabies projects (I am leading the project on rule-learning) and I am one of co-founders of the ManyManys collaboration setting up a teamscience network for comparative research. Starting in September 2025 I am leading the Research Priority Area Building interdisciplinary teamscience for future-proof higher-education research (with Niels Smits and Peter van Baalen). I apply open science practices throughout my research.
I teach the course Growing a mind, about computational models (including AI models) for learning and development. Besides this I supervise students in their thesis/internship project in developmental psychology, behavioral datascience and brain and cognitive sciences.
Besides research and teaching I am director of the College of psychology and responsible for the bachelor programme. I also chair the University Committee on Education, advising the University board about educational policy.