Dr. Leslie Carver

Biography

Leslie Carver is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, San Diego. His research primarily focuses on the development of the brain basis of social cognition and memory in infancy and early childhood. Carver employs a combination of established behavioral paradigms and event-related potentials (ERP) to explore questions related to explicit memory, shared attention, social and nonsocial reward processing, and social relationships in typically developing infants and children at risk for Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Among his recent research, he has tested the social motivation hypothesis, which suggests that social deficits observed in ASD may result from differences in the anticipation and processing of social rewards compared to nonsocial rewards. Carver's work aims to develop a reward anticipation paradigm that leverages the ability of young children and infants to anticipate events, in order to better understand the emergence of shared attention and its implications for children at risk of developing ASD.

Research Interests

Experience