Barbara Zapiór

I am a PhD student in the School of Psychology at the University of East Anglia, funded by the ESRC SENSS Doctoral Training Partnership.

My research, supervised by Dr Nadja Althaus, Professor Teodora Gliga, and Dr Jake Newman, focuses on language and conceptual development in infancy. In particular, I investigate how language and other social cues (e.g., touch, gestures, pointing) shape early category learning in naturalistic conditions.

In my work, I combine head-mounted eye-tracking studies of parent–child interactions with computational approaches such as machine learning, integrating methods from psychology and computer science to develop automated pipelines for pre-processing and analysis of social interaction and eye-tracking data. Across my research, I also employ screen-based eye-tracking, head cameras, behavioural coding, and parent-report measures.

I am passionate about how learning unfolds moment-by-moment in real-life circumstances, and which aspects of the complex caregiver-child-object interaction dynamics matter most in this context.