Dr. Wagner’s research uses eye-tracking and neural measures to examine early infant and child development across several areas, including social and emotional processing, learning and memory, and numerical perception. Her lab (The Cognitive Development Lab in 4S-104) studies these questions in both typically-developing children and those at risk for later developmental disorders. For example, one part of Dr. Wagner’s work examines social cognition in infants at risk for autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in hopes of identifying early markers that might predict a later ASD diagnosis. More broadly, recent work has also begun looking at autonomic markers of social and emotional processing during the first year of life, using measures like pupil diameter, to see how they might relate to later social abilities when these children reach preschool.
Degrees
Ph.D., Stanford University
B.S., Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Wagner, J. B., Luyster, R. J., Moustapha, H., Tager-Flusberg, H., & Nelson, C. A. (in press). Differential attention to faces in infant siblings of children with autism spectrum disorder. International Journal of Behavioral Development.
Edwards, L., Wagner, J. B., Simon, C. E., & Hyde, D. C. (2016). Functional brain organization for number processing in pre-verbal infants. Developmental Science, 19, 757-769.
Wagner, J. B., Luyster, R. J., Tager-Flusberg, H., & Nelson, C. A. (2016). Greater pupil size in response to emotional faces as an early marker of social-communicative difficulties in infants at high risk for autism. Infancy, 21, 560-581.
Norwood, A., Wagner, J. B., Motley, C., Hirsch, S. B., Vogel-Farley, V. K., & Nelson, C. A. (2014). Behavioral and electrophysiological indices of memory in typically-developing and hypoxic-ischemic injured infants. Infancy, 19, 28-52.
Keehn, B., Wagner, J. B., Tager-Flusberg, H., & Nelson, C.A. (2013). Functional connectivity in the first year of life in infants at high risk for autism: A near infrared spectroscopy study. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 7.
Fox, S. E., Wagner, J. B., Shrock, C. L., Tager-Flusberg, H., & Nelson, C. A. (2013). Neural processing of facial identity and emotion in infants at high risk for autism spectrum disorders. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 7.
Wagner, J. B., Luyster, R. J., Yim, J. Y., Tager-Flusberg, H., & Nelson, C. A. (2013). The role of early visual attention in social development. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 37, 118-124.
Wagner, J. B., Hirsch, S. B., Vogel-Farley, V., Redcay, E., & Nelson, C. A. (2013). Eye-tracking, autonomic, and electrophysiological correlates of emotional face processing in adolescents with autism spectrum disorder. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 43, 188-199.
Kirkham, N. Z., Wagner, J. B., Swan, K., & Johnson, S. P. (2012). Sound support: Intermodal information facilitates infants' perception of an occluded trajectory. Infant Behavior and Development, 35, 174-178.
Luyster, R. J., Wagner, J. B., Vogel-Farley, V. K., Tager-Flusberg, H., & Nelson, C. A. (2011). Neural correlates of familiar and unfamiliar face processing in infants at risk for autism spectrum disorders. Brain Topography, 24, 220-228.
Wagner, J. B., Fox, S. E., Tager-Flusberg, H., & Nelson, C. A. (2011). Neural processing of repetition and non-repetition grammars in 7- and 9-month-old infants. Frontiers in Psychology, 2.
Wagner, J. B. & Johnson, S. C. (2011). A relationship between understanding the cardinality of small numbers and analog magnitude representations in preschoolers. Cognition, 119, 10-22.
