Welcome James and Amy
The Department of Psychology and Human Development would like to welcome two new faculty members, James and Amy Booth
James R. Booth is the Patricia and Rodes Hart Professor of Educational Neuroscience in the
Department of Psychology and Human Development at Vanderbilt University. The overall goals
of his research are to understand the brain mechanisms of the development of reading, math
and scientific reasoning in typical and atypical populations. Prof. Booth has been continuously
funded for close to two decades and has published extensively in diverse journals. He has
served in various roles both within and outside of the university, such as departmental
chairperson, review panel member and associate editor. Prof Booth aims to facilitate the
interaction between the fields of cognition, neuroscience and education.
Amy Booth studies cognitive development and learning in young children. In much of her work,
she has explored interactions between categorization, conceptual knowledge and word learning
in infants and preschoolers. With the support of a grant from the National Science Foundation,
she is currently investigating the role of individual differences in children’s word-learning skills in
explaining disparities in vocabulary and early literacy as children enter school. In another line of
work, also supported by the National Science Foundation, Booth is investigating the origins of
children’s scientific literacy by examining early interests in, and ability to reason about, causal
information. The long-term goals of both projects are to develop early interventions to close
persistent achievement gaps and to optimize academic success for all children in both language
and science.