My primary research focus is developmental psychology. I’m interested in how the ability to interact and share experiences with others develops, starting in infancy and continuing into later childhood.
Current role.
I’m currently a Postdoctoral Research Associate working with Dr Bailey House and Professor Katie Slocombe at the University of York.
We are looking at how children’s prosocial behaviour (for example, how they share resources with others) is influenced by their understanding of social norms- the hidden societal rules about how we ought to act. This research is with participants in two very different cultural contexts- urban UK, and rural Uganda.
We’re looking at questions like:
How does children’s knowledge of social norms vary across different cultures, and how does this influence how they share with others?
How does cultural context influence whether and how children actually comply with social norms?
Previous roles.
After completing my PhD, I was a Postdoctoral Research Associate working with Professor Danielle Matthews at the University of Sheffield (May 2022 – Jan 2024).
I was part of a team evaluating the effectiveness of BBC Education’s Tiny Happy People service in supporting child language outcomes, funded by BBC Education. I continue to be involved in follow-up research building on this work, funded by the Nuffield Foundation (see here for details).
In this research, we were assessing whether texting caregivers with links to relevant Tiny Happy People videos (see here for some examples) could promote responsive caregiver interaction, thereby promoting child communication and language.
These data also allow us to addresses theoretically-relevant questions, such as “Does caregiver responsiveness influence pre-linguistic communication?”, and “What kind of early social interactions best predict language development?” Here’s some of what we’ve been working on:
Learning mechanisms influencing infants’ early socio-pragmatic abilities (preprint here)
Predicting early vocabulary development from infant prelinguistic communication and caregiver responses (preregistration here)
For my PhD research, with Professor Malinda Carpenter, I conducted longitudinal research with 6- to 12-month old infants, using behavioural tasks, observations, and interviews to try and understand infants’ social development. We addressed questions like:
When do infants start to share attention with others to the world around them?
When do gestures begin to emerge in infancy?
How do caregivers understand and interpret their baby’s communicative development?
Published research.
Salter, G., & Carpenter, M. (2022). Showing and giving: from incipient to conventional forms. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 377(1859), 20210102.
“Gestures are one of the earliest means that infants
employ to communicate with others, and showing and giving are among the earliest-emerging gestures. However, there are limited data on the processes that lead up to the emergence of conventional showing and giving gestures. “
Link.
Salter, G., & Breheny, R. (2019). Removing shared information improves 3-and 4-year-olds’ performance on a change-of-location explicit false belief task. Journal of experimental child psychology, 187.
“We conclude that a bias toward shared information is a relevant factor in understanding children’s difficulty with the standard test question used in the change-of-location explicit false belief task.”
Link.
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