My research focuses on the development of visual cognition in humans. Specifically, my students and I are addressing the following questions from a developmental perspective: 1. What is the nature of the information that infants and children encode from the environment?  2.  How do they organize this information to compute meaningful representations of objects and events?  3.  How do memory and other cognitive processes, such as expectancy, develop to enable the functional use of this information?  My research is funded by grants from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

Current research projects include:
1.The development of face processing in infancy.  
2.The development of visual organization in infancy.
3.The neural processes underlying the development of face and object processing in childhood (using fMRI techniques, in collaboration with Dr. Jane Joseph of the Anatomy and Neurobiology program at the University of Kentucky). 

• Hayden, A.*, Bhatt, R. S., Reed, A.*, Corbly, C. R.*, & Joseph, J. E. (2007).   The development of expert face processing:  Are infants sensitive to normal differences in second-order relational information?  Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 97, 85-98.

• Hayden, A.*, Bhatt, R. S., Joseph, J. E., & Tanaka, J. W. (2007).  The other-race effect in infancy: Evidence using a morphing technique.  Infancy, 12, 95-104.

• Bhatt, R. S., Hayden, A.*, & Quinn, P. C. (2007).  Perceptual organization based on common region in infancy.  Infancy, 12, 147-168.

• Joseph, J. E., Gathers, A. D. *, Liu, X. *, Corbly, C. R. *, Whitaker, S. K. *, & Bhatt, R. S. (2006).  Neural developmental changes in processing inverted faces.  Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Neuroscience, 6, 223-235.

• Bhatt, R. S., Hayden, A.*, Reed, A.*, Bertin, E., & Joseph, J. E. (2006).  Infants’ perception of information along object boundaries:  Concavities versus convexities.  Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 94, 91-113.

• Hayden, A.*,  Bhatt, R. S., & Quinn, P. C. (2006). Infants’ sensitivity to uniform connectedness as a cue for perceptual organization.  Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 13, 257-261.

• Quinn, P. C., & Bhatt, R. S. (2006).  Are some Gestalt principles deployed more readily than others during early development? The case of lightness versus form similarity.  Journal of Experimental Psychology:  Human Perception and Performance, 32, 1221-1230.

• Bhatt, R. S., Bertin, E.*, Hayden, A.*, & Reed, A.* (2005).  Face processing in infancy:  Developmental changes in the use of different kinds of relational information. Child Development, 76, 169-181.

• Quinn, P. C., & Bhatt, R. S. (2005). Learning perceptual organization in infancy. Psychological Science, 16, 511-515.

• Bertin, E.*, & Bhatt, R.S. (2004).  The Thatcher illusion and face processing in Infancy.  Developmental Science, 7, 431-436.

* denotes undergraduate, graduate, or post-doctoral student.