Rate My Professor Hanako Yoshida

Hanako Yoshida, Ph.D., is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Houston and Director of the Cognitive Development Lab in the Developmental, Cognitive, & Behavioral Neuroscience program. She earned her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from Indiana University Bloomington in 2003 and her B.A. in Psychology from the same institution in 1998. Yoshida's career at the University of Houston started in 2007 as a Visiting Assistant Professor, advancing to Assistant Professor from 2007 to 2013, Associate Professor from 2013, and full Professor. Prior to this, she was a Research Scientist in the Cognitive Development Lab at Indiana University from 2003 to 2006 under Linda Smith.

Her research centers on language learning mechanisms that produce specialized cognitive systems in young children, derived from domain-general processes through attention fine-tuning and contextual cueing. Yoshida investigates early attention and language development, word learning, bilingual cognition, cross-linguistic category learning, parental scaffolding, and gesture adaptations in children with autism spectrum disorders. Key publications include Perkovich et al. (2024), Conducting head-mounted eye-tracking research with young children with autism, Journal of Neurodevelopmental Disorders; Sun et al. (2024), Early development of saliency-driven attention through object manipulation, Acta Psychologica; Perkovich et al. (2022), What children with and without ASD see, Autism & Developmental Language Impairments; Yoshida et al. (2020), Parents’ gesture adaptations to children with autism spectrum disorders, Journal of Child Language; Burling & Yoshida (2019), Visual constancies amidst changes in handled objects for 5- to 24-month-old infants, Child Development; Tran et al. (2018), Early executive function: The influence of culture and bilingualism, Bilingualism: Language and Cognition; and Burling & Yoshida (2017), Highlighting in early childhood: Learning biases through attentional shifting, Cognitive Science. She received the 2019 University of Houston Faculty Excellence Award for Undergraduate Research Mentor, the 2006 Irving Saltzman Award from Indiana University, and other honors. Yoshida serves on the editorial board of Frontiers in Developmental Psychology since 2010 and reviews for journals like Cognition, Developmental Science, Child Development, and funding agencies including NSF and NIH.