Marc is a postdoctoral researcher in the Infant Learning and Development lab in the area of social-cognitive development. He investigates what cues influence infants’ predisposition to interact and learn from others and how infants make sense of others’ social interactions.

He received his B.A. in Audiovisual Systems Engineering from Universitat Pompeu Fabra (Spain, 2013) and his M.A. degree in Neuroscience from the Universitat de Barcelona (Spain, 2015). Then he conducted his Ph.D. with Prof. Núria Sebastian-Galles in the Center for Brain and Cognition, Universitat Pompeu Fabra. He joined the Infant Learning and Development lab after receiving his Ph.D. in October 2019.

Marc is currently exploring how infants represent agents and how this representation influences their social preferences. He addresses questions such as: Why do infants prefer to attend or imitate speakers of their native rather than foreign language? What is the role of surprise in selective learning? Which neurocognitive processes support infants’ capacity of navigating the social world selectively? He is also interested in exploring the development of our tendency to divide the social world into “us” and “them”. To address these questions, he uses behavioral (e.g. violation of expectation or eye-tracker) and electrophysiological techniques (EEG).

Office: Green Hall, Room 503
colomer@uchicago.edu