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Lisa Feigenson is a psychologist known for her research on children's development of numerical abilities, development of working memory, and early learning. She is a Professor and Director of Graduate Studies at the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences of Johns Hopkins University. Feigenson is the co-director of the Johns Hopkins University Laboratory for Child Development. She serves on the editorial board for Cognition since 2004 and the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General since 2011.

Feigenson is the recipient of the 2007 James S. McDonnell Foundation Scholar Award, 2010 Boyd McCandless Early Career Award from the American Psychological Association, and the 2015 Troland Research Award from the National Academy of Sciences.

Many of Feigenson's research were published in Science, Nature, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Feigenson's research received funding from organizations including the National Institute of Health, National Science Foundation, and the Overdeck Family Foundation.

Biography
Lisa Feigenson received her Bachelors of Arts in Psychology in 1997 at Cornell University under the advisement of Elizabeth Spelke. She then pursued a doctoral degree in Cognitive Psychology at New York University and graduated in 2003, under the advisement of Susan Carey. Feigenson was a visiting graduate student fellow at the Department of Psychology at Harvard University from 2001-2003. She then became a postdoctoral fellow at Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique in Ecole Normale Supérieure (CNRS).

Feigenson joined the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Johns Hopkins University in 2004. She worked as an Assistant Professor from 2004-2010, Associate Professor from 2010-2014, and was appointed as a Professor in 2014. She currently has a joint appoint in the Department of Cognitive Science. While at Johns Hopkins she received the 2011 Dean’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship, and the 2016 Dean’s Award for Excellence in Teaching and Service. In 2015 she became the Director of Graduate Studies at Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences.

Research
Feigenson's research explores the fundamental processes of human's cognition and their memory using infant and young children to test the limitations of theories related to the understanding of numbers. Many of her studies are related to numerical cognition, object-based attention, and short-term memory.

One of Feigenson's study involving a choice task with ten- and twelve-month-old infants examined how infants understand the concept of more and less. In this study, Feigenson concluded that these infants pay more attention to the total volume or the surface area of the cracker instead of viewing the item individually. Feigenson watched infants crawl towards two containers containing crackers and choose crackers from one of the containers. She observed that infants tend to choose the container with more crackers or crackers with the larger surface area. Her study supports the hypothesis that infants are more likely to rely on object-file representations than one-to-one correspondence between the object files.

Feigenson's study involving Approximate Number Sense, she suggests that there is a relationship between early sense of number and later mathematical ability. In this study, she gave three to five year old children a task that did not require symbol use or arithmetic calculation, while also testing their math ability and vocabulary size. Feigenson found a correlation between children's Approximate Number Sense and their mathematical ability even after controlling for children's vocabulary size and math ability before they received formal math education.

In another study, Feigenson examined the limits of infants' quantification of small object arrays, she used a four-object array to examine how infants represent information. The study supports the three-item limit of parallel representation where infants tend to fail to discriminate arrays with greater than three items. There is an emphasis that infants depend on object-based attention and short-term memory to represent small numbers of objects. Feigenson concluded that the infants were knowledgeable about the array -- realizing that the cracker exists, the cracker-material, and the size of the individual objects within the array despite failing to represent the quantity "four".

Representative Publications

 * Feigenson, L., Dehaene, S., & Spelke, E. (2004). Core systems of number. Trends in cognitive sciences, 8(7), 307-314.
 * Halberda, J., Mazzocco, M. M., & Feigenson, L. (2008). Individual differences in non-verbal number acuity correlate with maths achievement. Nature, 455(7213), 665.
 * Feigenson, L., Carey, S., & Hauser, M. (2002). The representations underlying infants' choice of more: Object files versus analog magnitudes. Psychological Science, 13(2), 150-156.
 * Halberda, J., & Feigenson, L. (2008). Developmental change in the acuity of the" Number Sense": The Approximate Number System in 3-, 4-, 5-, and 6-year-olds and adults. Developmental Psychology, 44(5), 1457.