Priya Silverstein

Institute for Globally Distributed Open Research and Education, Lancaster University

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About

Priya Silverstein is a developmental cognitive scientist whose research illuminates how infants acquire one of the most fundamental social-cognitive skills: gaze following. Her work sits at the intersection of developmental psychology and robotics, leveraging computational models to test theories of early learning. Silverstein’s key contribution is providing compelling evidence for learning-based accounts of gaze following, challenging long-held representational theories that assume infants possess innate, rich sensitivity to others’ gaze. Through a series of studies, including her most-cited paper “Infants Learn to Follow Gaze in Stages: Evidence Confirming a Robotic Prediction” (2021, 15 citations), she demonstrated that gaze following emerges in distinct developmental stages, precisely as predicted by a robotic model. This finding suggests that infants gradually learn to follow gaze through experience, rather than relying on pre-wired knowledge. Her 2019 paper “New Evidence for Learning-Based Accounts of Gaze Following” (3 citations) further strengthens this argument. By bridging robotics and infant cognition, Silverstein offers a mechanistic explanation for a skill foundational to joint attention and language development. Her work has significant implications for understanding typical and atypical development, and for designing interactive robots that learn like human infants.