Vaidehi S. Natu, Ph.D.
Staff Research Scientist, Stanford University, VPNL
I am a developmental and cognitive neuroscientist at Stanford University. My research program aims to study how the human brain matures from infancy to adulthood, as it acquires new cognitive skills and behaviors. Compared to many animal brains, human brains are less developed at birth and our cognitive and perceptual skills take a long time to mature. Our genetic makeup, social and physical environments, and the countless experiences during childhood shape the cognitive mechanisms that support complex human behaviors in adulthood. In my research, I work on answering the following fundamental questions in human cognition:
1. How nature and nurture contribute to development of visual and cognitive tasks?
2. What are the biological building blocks of plasticity during infancy?
3. How does experience sculpt socio-cognitive development during childhood?
I use a multi-modal approach by combining different techniques in my work. These include behavioral experiments, neuroimaging, histology, gene analysis, comparative methods across humans and macaques, and intracranial electroencephalography. This combination of techniques provides a unified understanding of how the brain’s anatomy, function, and behavior interact to achieve complex cognitive skills, and will potentially transform children’s lives.
