Vanderbilt University · PsychologyCenter for Early Childhood Learning and Neurodevelopment
Sophia Vinci-Booher · Nashville, Tennessee
Research Focus
Dr. Sophia Vinci-Booher's research lab focuses on understanding how children learn during their early schooling years. By studying brain changes and learning processes in first graders, her team aims to develop a better understanding of reading and math skills that are crucial for lifelong success. They use advanced neuroimaging techniques and educational resources like Sesame Street to assess how learning impacts brain development, ultimately working towards improving educational interventions for at-risk children.
neuroimagingearly childhood learningbrain developmentreading skillsmath skillseducational neuroscienceSesame Streetneural specializationlongitudinal studyintervention strategies
Research Aims
3AIM 01Create a large annotated image corpus from Sesame Street for educational content analysis.
AIM 02Collect and distribute a dense longitudinal MRI dataset to study brain changes during learning.
AIM 03Evaluate how selective neural processing for letters and digits develops during the first grade.
Skills the Lab Values
MRI data collectionimage processingeducational content annotationneuroimaging analysisdata set managementlongitudinal study designhigh-performance computingprogramming in Pythonstatistical modeling
Output against the department
Publications51bottom 9% of dept.269th of 296
this lab
most publishedleast published
Citations449bottom 4% of dept.284th of 296
this lab
most citedleast cited
Career totals from OpenAlex, compared against labs that share a department. A department spans everything from one paper to tens of thousands, so bar heights are on a log scale — otherwise the largest lab would flatten every other bar to a line.