Anastasia Stoops

After receiving  Ph.D. in the Cognitive Science of Teaching and Learning Division at the Department of Educational Psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Dr. Stoops completed a  one-year postdoctoral traineeship at Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology and a three-year NIH-funded clinical postdoctoral traineeship with a double appointment in the Psychiatry Department at Columbia University, NY and the Schizophrenia Program at the Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research (Orangeburg NY).  As part of her dissertation, she found that skilled readers process linguistic information earlier and more quickly in the visual system than previously thought, indicating that while human vision relies on parallel processing, language induces seriality in skilled readers. During her previous postdoctoral position in clinical psychology,  she examined the neural bases of reading dysfunction in schizophrenia. Currently, she is a research scientist affiliated with the Center for Artificial Intelligence Innovation (NCSA) and  the Learning and Language Lab (LeLaLab) where she investigates reading development from three perspectives:

1. Computational analyses of naturalistic environments that support literacy development i.e. human interactions "in the wild" (e.g. caregiver-child interactions during picture book reading at home)
2. Experimental (online and lab-based: eye-tracking and EEG) investigations of text exposure as a key source of linguistic input for language development
3. Computational modeling of visual and linguistic factors that modulate eye movements in skilled and developing readers