Shannon Pruden

Dr. Pruden received her PhD in Developmental Psychology from Temple University in 2007. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Chicago and the NSF-funded Spatial Intelligence Learning Center from 2007-2010. She joined the Psychology Department at Florida International University in 2010 and trains students in their Developmental Science graduate program. Her research has been published in the top Developmental Psychology journals in the field, including Psychological Science, Developmental Science, Child Development, Nature Human Behavior, and Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, and is supported by federal (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development; National Science Foundation) and private foundation grants.

Research Areas

Dr. Pruden's research program, the Project on Language and Spatial Development, aims to understand how children acquire language, particularly those words that describe the spatial and relational world (i.e., motion verbs, spatial prepositions and dimensional adjectives; e.g., running, under, and big). She explores the causes and consequences of individual and sex differences in spatial language and spatial cognition in both child and adult populations. Her recent research examines cognitive, cultural and biological causes of individual and sex differences in spatial language and cognition.

She currently has a National Institute of Child Health and Human Development grant to study the neurobiological correlates of children's spatial reorientation abilities.

Education

• PhD, Developmental Psychology, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA
• MA, Developmental Psychology, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA
• BA, Psychology, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA
• BA, Cognitive Science, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA