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Biography

Dr. Laura Thompson has taught graduate courses for over 20 years. Her main research interests are in cognitive neuroscience, where she studies how stress affects cognition in both infants and adults. She conducted, for example, a longitudinal study of infants during their first year, investigating how mildly stressful situations impacted their ability to learn and remember stimuli, using cortisol as a biological marker of stress. In the same study, she investigated how infant temperament and maternal sensitivity impacted infant learning and memory. Much of her focus is on characterizing individual and task differences that elicit different patterns of stress response.

Her ongoing work continues her primary interest in characterizing the multitude of factors that affect how well infants can learn, including the environment of the womb, and maternal social factors.

In her spare time, she enjoys time spent with her children, running, riding her horse, and playing the piano.