Martin Zettersten is a postdoctoral research associate in the Princeton Baby Lab in the Department of Psychology at Princeton University. He was trained in linguistics and psychology at Heidelberg University and the University of Edinburgh before completing his PhD in cognitive psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison as an NSF graduate research fellow. His work uses behavioral and computational methods to understand the mechanisms that support language learning and cognitive development in infants and young children. In one line of work, he studies the role of curiosity and exploration in children’s early learning. A second line of work focuses on how language transforms cognitive development and opens windows into new knowledge. The long-term goal of this work is to understand what kinds of environments best support children’s early language learning and cognitive development.

Alongside his primary research interests, Martin is working on several team-based projects to improve methods in infancy research and build a cumulative science of child development. He is an active member of the ManyBabies consortium, an organization devoted to multi-lab replications of key findings in infant development. He is currently the co-lead for ManyBabies5, a large-scale, international collaboration that will test classic theories about central factors that drive infants’ attention. He is also the lead of Peekbank, an open database and interface for developmental eye-tracking datasets. The underlying goal of these collaborative endeavors is to improve our ability to ask fundamental questions about how children learn.