Dr. LoBue is interested in the development of infants and young children in multiple domains, including emotional, cognitive, and perceptual. She received her B.S. at Carnegie Mellon University where she worked as an undergraduate research assistant in an infant cognition lab. From there, she went on to earn her M.A. and Ph.D. in developmental psychology at the University of Virginia, and then completed a two-year post-doc at New York University. She joined the faculty at Rutgers-Newark in the spring of 2011.
Dr. LoBue's research focuses on the perception of emotionally valenced stimuli over the lifespan. Emotional stimuli constitute a unique class of stimuli for humans, and research suggests that they may hold a special status in human perception. In her work, Dr. LoBue asks: How do humans respond to emotional stimuli? Are they perceived faster than neutral stimuli? Does emotional valence affect the way humans learn about objects? While these questions are relevant to humans over the entire lifespan, Dr. LoBue focuses specifically on young children and infants. By focusing on young children, the development of these perceptual and learning systems can be examined, and we can find out how emotions and experiences may change the way we see the world around us.
