Professor Diane Poulin-Dubois, Psychology Department, Concordia University

Education

PhD (Université de Montréal)
Postdoctoral Fellow (McGill; Harvard University) 

Research interests

My research interests center on early cognitive and language development.   A first area of research concerns the cognitive benefits of bilingualism during the first years of life  (NSERC Discovery Grant).   A second area of research concerns early social cognition, particularly the development of a theory of mind during the first two years of life (SSHRC Insight grant). At what age and how infants attribute desires, emotions, and intentions is currently being examined by comparing infants' behaviors towards people and robots. My team is also conducting research on selective learning by exploring trust in robot vs. human informants in collaboration with research teams in Italy, Singarore and US.

Undergraduate-Level

PSYC 431        Infancy

PSYC 364        Fundamentals of Cognition                                                      

 

Graduate-Level

PSYC 714        Central Topics, Graduate Seminar                                            

PSYC 725        Current Issues in Developmental Science, Special Topic Seminar   

Psyc 726.         Executive Functions across the lifespan, Special Topic Seminar

Recent publications

2024
Goldman, J. & Poulin-Dubois, D. (2024). Children’s anthropomorphism of
inanimate agents. WIREs Cognitive Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcs.1676
Dutemple, E., Brokl, C., & Poulin-Dubois, D. (2024). I think therefore I learn: Metacognition is
a better predictor of school readiness than executive functions. Frontiers in Developmental Psychology, 2. https://doi.org/10.3389/fdpys.2024.1332358
2023
Baumann, A-E., Goldman, E. J., Cobos, M-G. C., & Poulin-Dubois, P. (2023) Do preschoolers trust a competent robot pointer? Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 5(238), 105783. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2023.105783
Poulin-Dubois, D. & Goldman, E. J. (2023). Is False Belief Understanding Stable from Infancy to Childhood? We don’t know yet. Cognitive Development, 66(5), 101309. doi:
10.1016/j.cogdev.2023.101309.
Poulin-Dubois, D., Goldman, E. J., Meltzer, A., & Psaradellis, E. (2023). Discontinuity from
implicit to explicit theory of mind from infancy to preschool age. Cognitive Development, 65, 101273. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogdev.2022.101273
Dutemple, E., Hakimi, H. & Poulin-Dubois, D. (2023). Who knows best? Studying the link between children’s monitoring and control skills, theory of mind, and selective social learning. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 227. 105572. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2022.105572
Goldman, E. J., Baumann, A. E. & Poulin-Dubois, D. (2023). Of children and social
robots. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 46, e35. doi: 10.1017/S0140525X22001583.
Dragon, M., & Poulin-Dubois, D. (2023). To copy or not to copy: A Comparison of Selective
Trust and overimitation in young children. Cognitive Development, 66, 101316. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogdev.2023.101316.
Goldman, E. J., Baumann, A.-E., & Poulin-Dubois, D. (2023). Preschoolers’
anthropomorphizing of robots: Do human-like properties matter? Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 1102370. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1102370.
Baumann, A-E., Goldman, E. J., Meltzer, A. & Poulin-Dubois, D. (2023). People Do Not Always Know Best: Preschoolers’ Trust in Social Robots. Journal of Cognition and Development, 24(4), 535-562. doi: 10.1080/15248372.2023.2178435.
2022
Beaudin, K. & Poulin-Dubois, D. (2022). A test of the cognitive bilingual advantage in Toddlers with the Early Executive Functions Questionnaire. Languages, 7(2),122. https://doi.org/10.3390/languages7020122.
Beaudin, K., Poulin-Dubois, D. & Zesiger, P. (2022). Touching while listening: Does infants’ haptic word processing speed predict vocabulary development? Journal of Child Language, 1-19. doi:10.1017/S0305000922000423
Poulin-Dubois, D., Neumann, C., Masoud, S., & Gazith, A. (2021). Effect of bilingualism on infants’ cognitive flexibility. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 25(3), 484-497. doi:10.1017/S1366728921000912
Ruel, A., Chiarella, S. S., Crivello, C., & Poulin-Dubois, D. (2021). Concurrent validity of the modified checklist for autism in toddlers (M-CHAT): Socio-cognitive and verbal skills in 18-Month-Old infants. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 51(3), 933-949. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-020-04379-6
Crivello, C., Grossman, S., & Poulin-Dubois, D. (2021). Specifying links between infants’ theory of mind, associative learning, and selective trust. Infancy, 26(5), 664-685. https://doi.org/10.1111/infa.12407.
Kehoe, M., Poulin-Dubois, D., & Friend, M. (2021). Within- and cross-language relations between phonological memory, vocabulary, and grammar in bilingual children. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 64(12), 4918–4948. https://doi.org/10.1044/2021_jslhr-21-00176
Kehoe, M., Friend, M., & Poulin-Dubois, D. (2021). Relations between phonological production, grammar and the lexicon in bilingual French-english children. International Journal of Bilingualism, 25(6), 1576–1596. https://doi.org/10.1177/13670069211031987
Resendes, T., Benchimol-Elkaim, B., Delisle, C., René, J-L., & Poulin-Dubois, D. (2021). What I know and what you know: The role of metacognitive strategies in preschoolers’ selective social learning. Cognitive Development, 60, 101117. doi.org/10.1016/j.cogdev.2021.101117
Smolak, E., Hendrickson, K., Zesiger, P., Poulin-Dubois, D., & Friend, M. (2021). Visual and haptic responses as measures of word comprehension and speed of processing in toddlers: Relative predictive utility. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 203, 105032. doi: 10.1016/j.jecp.2020.105032.
Poulin-Dubois, D., Dutemple, E., & Burnside, K. (2021). Naïve Theories of Biology, Physics, and Psychology in Children with ASD. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 51(10), 3600-3609. doi: 10.1007/s10803-020-04813-9.