Assistant Professor of Neuroscience (and member of AU’s Center for Neuroscience and Behavior) Laurie Bayet has been named an Association for Psychological Science (APS) Rising Star—a prestigious designation awarded to outstanding APS members in the earliest stages of their post-PhD research careers.  

APS is the global scientific home of more than 25,000 leading psychological science researchers, practitioners, teachers, and students across all continents, dedicated to advancing scientific psychology across disciplinary and geographic borders Its Rising Star designation draws its name from an APS Observer journal series that featured exemplars of the exciting work being done by the field’s newest researchers. The award recognizes researchers whose innovative work has already advanced the field and signals great potential for their continued contributions.  

Bayet says she is honored to be named a Rising Star. “This recognition is based on important contributions to my research program by many past and present colleagues, students, and participating families, and on support I’ve received from AU’s College of Arts and Sciences and the Center for Neuroscience and Behavior,” she explains. “My laboratory will continue to build on our early research accomplishments by using novel techniques to address new questions about how the infant brain represents the visual world.”   

Most Promising Young Star

Bayet is a developmental cognitive neuroscientist interested in infant cognitive development and high-level vision. Her laboratory combines electro-encephalography (EEG), behavioral methods, and computational tools to uncover how infants and young children learn to interpret complex visual objects relevant to affective, social communication. To that end, the lab has a particular focus on the rich, clinically relevant, and well-described case of affective facial expression perception and understanding.

With the Rising Star designation by the APS, Bayet joins the ranks of some of the field’s most promising young stars. “Dr. Bayet’s research is helping us to understand how infants perceive and begin to understand the world,” says Terry Davidson, American University’s Trone Family Eminent Scholar Chair in Neuroscience and Behavior. “Her work provides important new evidence that infants can identify different emotions based on the facial expressions that they see, and that identifying these expressions is associated with activity in different neural circuits in the infant’s brain.  Dr. Bayet’s findings have important implications for investigating how very early-life visual experiences influence the subsequent development of social and affective communication skills.”