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Anastasia Stoops

Profile picture for Anastasia Stoops

Contact Information

308 Psychology Building
603 E Daniel Street
M/C 716
Champaign, IL 61820
Research Scientist

Biography

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

 

Research Interests

  • Language Learning and Reading Development
  • Computational Modeling
  • Neuroscience of Visual Cognition

Education

Post Doc Columbia University
Post Doc Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
PhD University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
MA Texas Tech University
BA Moldova State University
AS Pedagogical College, Chisinau, Moldova

Grants

National Science Foundation (NSF): Understanding eye movements in skilled and novice readers - a behavioral and computational approach. Role: co-PI (PI: Montag, J; co-PI: Willits, J; Collaborator:  Kindratenko, V).  2022-2025,  $500,000.00

Awards and Honors

Fellow, National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), 2021-2022 
Facebook, Global Literacy and Accessability Challenge Research Award, 2018

Courses Taught

EPSY 405: Adolescent Psychology
EPSY 402: Psychology of Adult Learning 
EPSY 201: Honors Symposium in Education
EPSY 200: Educational Psychology

 

selected service activities

  1. Developer of the open-source assessments and interventions targeting second language learners
  2. Contributor to the open-source datamarts: CHILDES and Open Science Framework (OSF)
  3. Judge and mentor for the Student Pushing Innovation (SPIN) fellowship and the Undergraduate Research Symposium since 2020: mentored students consistently receive various competitive scholarships, awards, and prizes

selected publications

  1. Stoops, A., Wu, M., Jung, I.H.T., & Montag, J.L. (2024). A novel corpus of naturalistic picture book reading with 2- to 3-year-old children. Language Development Research, 4(1), 259—297. http://doi.org/10.34842/3kz6-4s17
  2. Stoops, A., & Montag, J.L. (2023). Effects of individual differences in text exposure on sentence comprehension. Scientific Reports, 13, 16812 doi: 10.1038/s41598-023-43801-8
  3. Stoops, A., & Christianson, K. (2022). Syntactic predictability modulates parafoveal processing of verbal morphology. Journal of Vision, 22(14),  doi:10.1167/jov.22.14.3284