Dr. Petra Hauf is a professor of psychology at StFX. and a Canada Research Chair in Culture and Human Development. She is a researcher in infant cognitive development focusing on the development of action production and understanding. She has a PhD in psychology from Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt, and previously worked as a senior research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Munich, Germany. Prior to coming to Canada, she was an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Frankfurt .
Dr. Hauf currently collaborates with numerous research scientists who work at high profile universities and research institutes in North America and Europe. These collaborations include work with Josep Call of the Max-Planck-Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, Claes von Hofsten and Kerstin Rosander from Uppsala University in Sweden, Gustaf Gredebäck of the University of Oslo, Norway, Martin Giese of the University of Wales in Bangor, UK, Viktor Sarris and Helmut Prior from Goethe University in Germany and Renee Baillargeon of the University of Illinois, USA.
“My primary research interest is the early development of action understanding. I am particularly interested in infant action control, infant understanding of actions performed by others and how these two aspects are related to each other during early development. This interest is based upon the question how infants come to understand own and actions of others. Do they need to be able to produce an action by their own before they are able to understand actions of others? Or do they first understand actions of others and afterward figure out that they are able to produce these actions by their own?
In order to investigate this topic I am focusing on perceptual and motor development during the first year of life. Additional I am interested in biological movements like crawling or walking. How do infants discover movements in their environment? And how is this discovery related to own motor capacities? Currently, I am using novel eye tracking technology combined with imitation paradigms in order to investigate these issues. My other research interests are the role of action effects in action control, detection of movement contingencies in early infancy, and the influence of tactile experience on the perception of physical events."
