The Developmental Processes Lab at York University serves a group of cognitive developmental psychologists who study the processes that underlie developmental change and individual differences in performance on cognitive tasks. Much of the research is framed within the Theory of Constructive Operators and examines limits that mental-attentional (M-) capacity place on children’s or adults’ performance.

Main research lines concern the measurement of M-capacity, the role of executive functions, performance in domains such as language and mathematics, conceptual and visuospatial abilities, etc., as well as the study of factors in individual-difference categories such as cognitive giftedness, cognitive style, Deaf children from hearing mothers, language impairment, mental-attentional deficits and their circadian rhythm, etc. In a smaller scale we also investigate the neuropsychology of some of these processes seeking their brain correlates with the use, in collaboration with other Labs, of fMRI and other neuroscientific techniques.

The Lab directors are Juan Pascual-Leone (M.D. Ph.D), Professor and Senior Scholar, and Janice Johnson (Ph.D.), Associate Professor, both from York’s Psychology Department. Click here to see the names and of current graduate students.