Dr. Haley Vlach

Biography

Haley Vlach is a professor in the Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her research focuses on understanding how children achieve remarkable developmental milestones in cognition. She studies visual attention and the mechanisms that enable children to learn from their experiences. By utilizing the Tobii X3-120 eyetracker, her lab collects detailed data on children's eye movements, which aids in investigating the role of visual attention in learning. Vlach’s work suggests that visual attention plays a critical role in cognitive development and learning processes. She emphasizes the importance of early experiences in foundational learning and seeks to elucidate the factors that facilitate children's language acquisition, category formation, and understanding of complex concepts. Her lab, the Learning, Cognition, Development Lab, explores these themes through empirical research.

Research Interests