Developmental Psychology - Dr. Ezgi Kayhan

In 2012, Ezgi received a fellowship from the European Union Marie Curie Actions-Seventh Research Programme (FP7) to join the ACT Initial Training Network to pursue her doctoral studies at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior in the Netherlands under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Harold Bekkering and Prof. Dr. Sabine Hunnius. In 2014, Ezgi visited the Uppsala Child and Baby Lab in Sweden for three months to work with Prof. Dr. Gustaf Gredebäck. Using several methods such as eye tracking, EEG and computational modeling, her doctoral work investigated how young children learn about the structure of the world and how they adjust their world models in response to changes in the environment.

In 2017, she started to work as a postdoctoral researcher at Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Stefanie Hoehl to investigate the dynamics of social learning using several brain-to-brain synchronization methods such as dual EEG and fNIRS (i.e. hyperscanning).

In 2019, Ezgi started her position at the University of Potsdam funded through a “Temporary Positions for Principal Investigators” phase-1 grant awarded to her within the DFG Priority Programme “The Active Self” with which she investigated emerging sense of self in infancy. In 2020, Ezgi received a grant from the University of Potsdam Faculty of Cognitive Sciences for a project to investigate how early mother-infant interpersonal synchrony shapes language development. Ezgi further collaborated in grants from Austrian Science Foundation (FWF) to examine the link between early interoception and social-emotional development.

In 2022, Ezgi received her second “Temporary Positions for Principal Investigators” grant with a project in which she examines brain-body interactions in development (http://www.activeself.de/keep-the-breath-in-mind-respiratory-interoception-in-the-developing-brain/). In 2021, Ezgi was selected among top 20 exceptionally talented women in science by the Falling Walls Foundation.

Vanoncini, M., Hoehl, S., Elsner, B., Wallot, S., Boll-Avetisyan, N., & Kayhan, E. (2024). Mother-infant social gaze dynamics relate to infant brain activity and word segmentation. Dev. Cogn. Neurosci. 65:101331. doi: 10.1016/j.dcn.2023.101331

Tünte, M. R., Hoehl, S., Wunderwald, M., Bullinger, J., Boyadziheva, A., Maister, L., Elsner, B., Tsakiris, M., & Kayhan, E. (2024). Respiratory and Cardiac Interoceptive Sensitivity in the First Two Years of Life. eLife, 12. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.91579.2

Xie, S., Hoehl, S., Moeskops, M., Kayhan, E., Kliesch, C., Turtleton, B., Köster, M., & Cichy, R.M. (2022). Visual category representations in the infant brain. Current Biology, 32, 1-11. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2022.11.016

Vanoncini, M., Boll-Avetisyan, N., Elsner, B., Höhl, S. & Kayhan, E. (2022). The role of mother-infant emotional synchrony in speech processing in 9-month-old infants. Infant Behavior and Development, 69, 101772. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infbeh.2022.101772

Kayhan, E., Nyugen, Q. T., Matthes, D., Langeloh, M., Michel, C., Jiang, J., & Hoehl, S. (2022).Interpersonal neural synchrony when predicting others’ actions during a game of rock-paper-scissors. Scientific Reports, 12, 12967. doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-16956-z .

Hafner, V., Hommel, B., Kayhan, E, Lee, D., Paulus, M., & Verschoor, S. (2022). Editorial: The Mechanisms Underlying the Human Minimal Self. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 961480. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.961480

Kayhan, E., Matthes, D., Michel, C., Langeloh, M., Bánki, A., Haresign, I.M.,Wass, S., & Hoehl, S. (2022). DEEP: A dual EEG pipeline for developmental hyperscanning studies. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 54, 101104. doi: 10.1016/j.dcn.2022.101104.

Meyer, M., Lamers, D., Kayhan, E., Hunnius, S, & Oostenveld, R. (2021). Enhancing reproducibility in developmental EEG research: BIDS, cluster-based permutation tests, and effect sizes. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 52, 101036. doi: 10.1016/j.dcn.2021.101036. 

Musculus, L., Tünte, M. R., Raab, M., & Kayhan, E. (2021). An embodied cognition perspective on the role of interoception in the development of the minimal self. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 716950. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.716950.

Boyadzhieva, A., & Kayhan, E. (2021). Keeping the Breath in Mind: Respiration, Neural Oscillations, and the Free Energy Principle. Frontiers in Neuroscience, 15, 647579. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2021.647579.

Nguyen, P. D. H., Georgie, Y. K., Kayhan, E., Eppe, M., Hafner, V. V., & Wermter, S. (2021). Sensorimotor  representation learning for an "active self" in robots: A model survey. Künstliche Intelligenz, 1-27. doi: 10.1007/s13218-021-00703-z.

Nguyen, T., Schleihauf, H., Kungl, M., Kayhan, E., Hoehl, S., & Vrtička, P. (2021). Interpersonal neural synchrony during father-child problem solving: An fNIRS hyperscanning study. Child Development. doi:  https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13510

Michel, C., Kayhan, E., Pauen, S., & Hoehl, S. (2021). Effects of reinforcement learning on gaze following of gaze and head direction in early infancy: An interactive eye-tracking study. Child Development. doi: 10.1111/cdev.13497 .

Nguyen, Q.T., Schleihauf, H., Kayhan, E., Matthes, D., Vrticka, P., & Hoehl, S. (2020). Neural synchrony in mother-child conversation: Exploring the role of communicative features. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. nsaa079. doi: 10.1093/scan/nsaa079.

Nguyen, Q.T., Schleihauf, H., Kayhan, E., Matthes, D., Vrticka, P., & Hoehl, S. (2020). The effects of interaction quality on neural synchrony during mother-child problem solving. Cortex, 124, 235-249. doi: 10.1016/j.cortex.2019.11.020.

Köster, M., Kayhan, E, Langeloh, M., & Hoehl, S. (2020). Making Sense of the World: Infant Learning from a Predictive Processing Perspective. Perspectives on Psychological Science. doi: 10.1177/1745691619895071.

Kayhan, E., Meyer, M., O’Reilly, J. X., Hunnius, S., & Bekkering, H. (2019). Nine-month-old infants update their predictive models of a changing environment. Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 38, 100680. doi: 10.1016/j.dcn.2019.100680.

Kayhan, E., Heil, L., Kwisthout, J., van Rooij, I., Hunnius, S., & Bekkering, H. (2019). Young children integrate current observations, priors and agent information to predict others' actions. PLOS ONE 14(5): e0200976. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0200976.

Kayhan, E., Hunnius, S., O'Reilly, J. X., & Bekkering, H. (2019). Infants differentially update their internal models of a dynamic environment. Cognition, 186, 139-146. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2019.02.004.

Kayhan, E., Gredebäck, G., & Lindskog, M. (2017). Infants distinguish between two events based on their relative likelihood. Child Development, 89(6):e507-e519. doi: 10.1111/cdev.12970. (Press release can be found here: https://www.cbs.mpg.de/probability-babies)

Kayhan, E. & Kwisthout, J. (2017). Predictive processing in development. CDS newsletter: The newsletter of the technical committee on cognitive and developmental systems. Available at http://goo.gl/dyrg6s