Psychology Seminar, Umay Şen (Uppsala University)

This talk presents a theoretical and empirical account of how context shapes human development from infancy through early childhood, drawing on embodied and bioecological perspectives that conceptualize context as a set of environmental influences shaping development. I examine infant motor and cognitive development, focusing on how infants learn sensorimotor contingencies in their immediate environment. I extend this work to early childhood by examining cognitive development in non-WEIRD contexts shaped by social change, including urbanization, migration, war, and culture. Together, these studies demonstrate that environmental influences on development emerge early and operate through both proximal and distal contexts across development.

Bio:

Umay Sen is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Psychology at Uppsala University. She received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in psychology from Boğaziçi University, where she completed her master’s thesis under the supervision of Ayşecan Boduroğlu. She earned her PhD from Uppsala University in 2023 under the supervision of Gustaf Gredebäck. Her research focuses on cognitive development in early infancy and childhood. She is particularly interested in human development in the context of social change, including urbanization, poverty, neighborhood environments, migration, and war. Her work has been published in leading developmental psychology journals, including Child Development, Human Development, and Developmental Science.