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Elena Altmann

Education

I graduated with a BSc in Psychology from Potsdam University, Germany. There, I worked as a student research assistant at the Babylab and discovered my fascination with developmental research and more specifically, infants’ cognitive development. Thus, to pursue a career in this research field, I completed the Psychology Research Master at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, with a strong focus on research integrity and advanced methodological and statistical skill development. My Master’s Thesis concerned the development and information-theoretical validation of an object familiarity scale to assess how familiar infants are with a given object.

At Lancaster University, United Kingdom, I then completed my PhD on infant curiosity as a crucial driver for early learning under supervision of Prof. Gert Westermann and Dr Marina Bazhydai. Specifically, I developed a novel paradigm to investigate active exploration in a controllable environment using gaze-contingent eye-tracking – a method that allows infants’ gaze to interact and control what is being presented on the computer screen. Furthermore, I developed the Infant and Toddler Curiosity Questionnaire to measure individual differences in early trait curiosity via tendencies of active exploration and information seeking in daily life. This questionnaire has now already been translated into German, Dutch, Italian, and Japanese with increasing interest from the field. It has also led to an international collaboration between Lancaster University (UK), Birkbeck University (UK), Donders Institute Nijmegen (NL), and Göttingen University (GER), in which we developed a child version of this questionnaire.

During my time in Lancaster, I also had the opportunity to accumulate extensive teaching experience, achieve the status of Associate Fellow in Higher Education, organise diverse academic (e.g., Lancaster’s international conference for infant research LCICD) and public (e.g., Pint of Science; Light-up-Lancaster) events to disseminate developmental research, and conduct research on the effect of educational travel programs on pupils’ curiosity and wonder in collaboration with an industry partner (Next Generation Travel). Additionally, I received the LuCiD Study Visit Grant to visit Prof. Caroline Rowe at the Max-Plank-Institute of Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen (NL) where we developed ideas about studies on the effects of curiosity in early world learning but also where I was able to learn about fascinating research on animal linguistics.

Postdoc Projects

In August 2024, I started a Postdoc position at Göttingen University for which I will continue to conduct innovative research on infant curiosity and mechanisms of early learning, and will lead an international, comparative Many Curiosities project aimed at investigating curiosity in human children and non-human primates.

Specifically, I will develop research projects including but not limited to the following topics:

  1. Infants are capable of extracting statistical probabilities from their environment; however, little is known about the specific information they encode. RQ: Do they encode the transitional probabilities of the sequence or the form of each stimulus?
  2. There is evidence that the timing schedule of presented information can benefit learning; however, little is known about such schedules in infancy. RQ: Which timing schedules are most beneficial for infants and what kind of schedules infants generate themselves.
  3. Parameters such as Novelty, Predictability and Uncertainty have been shown to trigger curiosity; however, little is known about how these parameters affect infants’ active information sampling. RQ: To what degree do information-theoretical parameters increase or change patterns of infants’ curiosity-based information sampling?
  4. Pre-verbal infants and animals such as non-human primates have long been neglected from curiosity research; however, better understanding the mechanisms and developmental trajectories of curious exploration across species may help us better understand the evolutionary basis and fitness advantages of more curious species.

 

PhD project

My PhD project is entitled “In the Driver’s Seat of Development: An Investigation of Infants’ Curiosity-driven Exploration”. The general objectives were:

  1. to develop methodological innovations in the conceptualisation and measurement of infants’ state and trait curiosity
  2. to capture patterns and systematicities in infants’ dynamic, curiosity-based information sampling as well as individual differences in their early trait curiosity
  3. and explore to what extend those trait differences could explain variance in said information sampling and in their language development one year later.

PhD Thesis

My thesis entitled: “In the Driver’s Seat of Development: An Investigation of Infants’ Curiosity-driven Exploration” was submitted in May 2024 and defended in June 2024. The thesis committee was composed of Prof. Dr Natasha Kirkham, Prof. Dr Jill Laney, and Prof. Dr Tom Beesley.

 

General Research Interests

Babies perceive and actively take in much more of the world and what’s happening around them, than one might think. My research interests are to better understand early cognitive development on a fundamental level, and more specifically, infants’ active role in it. This is important to investigate because individual differences in how infants explore and learn about the world likely have cascading effects on their cognitive development, their ability to learn and grow throughout life, as well as mental and cognitive health later in life.

I believe that non-verbal populations (preverbal infants; animals) are unfairly dismissed in a similar way by modern theories of curiosity. Thus, it is important to me to change that perception by conducting meaningful research that can also further the theoretical conceptualisations of curiosity including these populations.

 

 

Publications & Preprints

Altmann, E. C., Bazhydai, M., Westermann, G. (2025a). Curious Choices: Infants’ moment-to-moment information sampling is driven by their exploration history. Cognition, 254, 105976. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2024.105976

Altmann, E. C., Bazhydai, M., Westermann, G. (2025b). The Infant and Toddler Curiosity Questionnaire: A validated caregiver-report measure of curiosity in children from 5 to 24 months. Infancy. https://doi.org/10.1111/infa.70001

Altmann, E. C., Bazhydai, M., & Westermann, G. (Revision and Resubmit for First Language). Subscales of infants’ trait curiosity differentially predict their productive vocabulary one year later.

Bazhydai, M., Wong., M., Altmann, E. C., Jones, S. D., Westermann, G. (in principle acceptance in Developmental Science). Does curiosity enhance word learning in 18-month-old infants? A Registered Report.

Singh, L., Barokova, M., Baumgartner, H. A., Lopera, D., Omane, P., Sheskin, M., …Altmann., E. C., … Frank, M. C. (2023). A Unified Approach to Demographic Data Collection for Research with Young Children Across Diverse Cultures. Developmental Psychology.

van Dongen, N., …Altmann., E. C., …Borsboom, D. (2024). Practicing Theory Building in a Many Modelers Hackathon: A Proof of Concept. Meta-Psychology.