We welcome you to the Social and Communicative Development Research Lab in the Department of Psychology at Simon Fraser University. In our lab, directed by Tim Racine, we primarily investigate the origins of communication and the ability to share attention with others by using ethological and quasi-experimental methods. 

In our view, a problem in contemporary investigations of these foundational skills is that they are often based on untenable evolutionary and epistemological assumptions. An important aspect of our work is therefore to ground our studies in conceptually coherent notions of mind-body and gene-environment relations. Accordingly, our research takes an ethologically-inspired systems approach that reflects the evolutionary paradigm of evolutionary developmental psychology (“evo-devo”). Our goal is to reveal developmental transitions in a variety of related cognitive, emotional and communicative behaviours in real time in a way that takes rearing histories and other epigenetic factors seriously in account.