Julie Markant, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Education & Affiliations
Biography
Dr. Julie Markant is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Tulane University. She earned a B.A. in Psychology from Cornell University and a Ph.D. in Child Psychology from the Institute of Child Development at the University of Minnesota. Prior to coming to Tulane, Dr. Markant completed postdoctoral training in the Department of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences at Brown University.
You can learn from about Dr. Markant’s current work and the Learning and Brain Development Lab here: https://lbdlab.tulane.edu/.
Dr. Markant is currently accepting graduate students. Dr. Markant accepts graduate students from the Psychology and Neuroscience Ph.D. programs.
Courses
PSYC 7020 - Developmental Psychology
Research
Dr. Markant’s research focuses on mechanisms that link the development of selective attention and efficient learning during infancy and early childhood. Her work takes a bidirectional approach by investigating 1) the role of developing attention control in promoting more effective learning and 2) the role of prior learning and experience in shaping our ability to efficiently orient to meaningful information. This research is grounded in a developmental perspective and the understanding that multiple biological and contextual factors contribute to change in these processes over time. Dr. Markant therefore aims to understand how both neurobehavioral mechanisms and individual experience contribute to variability in attention and learning outcomes. To address these questions Dr. Markant’s research emphasizes behavioral and eye tracking methods and has also incorporated genetic, ECG, MRI, and fNIRS measures.
Selected Publications
Hunter, B.K., Kizildere, E., Klotz, S.M., Nelson, C.M., Markant, J., & Oakes, L.M. (2025). What have we learned about infant visual attention in the first 25 years of the 21st century? Infant Behavior and Development. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infbeh.2025.102135
Hunter, B.K., Montgomery, B., Sridhar, A., & Markant, J. (2024). Endogenous control and reward-based mechanisms shape infants’ attention biases to caregiver faces. Developmental Psychobiology, 66(6), e22521. https://doi.org/10.1002/dev.22521
Hunter, B.K. & Markant, J. (2023). Caregiver faces capture 6- to 10-year-old children’s attention orienting during an online visual search task. Developmental Psychology, 59(2), 344-352. https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0001420
King, J. & Markant, J. (2022). Selective attention to lesson-relevant competing information promotes 3- to 5-year-old children’s learning. Developmental Science, 25, e13237. https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.13237
Markant, J. & Amso, D. (2022). Context and attention control determine whether attending to competing information helps or hinders learning in school-aged children. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 13(1), e1577. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcs.1577
Noonan, C.F., Hunter, B.K, & Markant, J. (2021). Dynamic emotional messages differentially affect 6-month-old infants’ attention to eyes and gaze cues. Infant Behavior and Development, 64, 101626. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infbeh.2021.101626
Hunter, B.K. & Markant, J. (2021). Differential sensitivity to species- and race-based information in the development of attention orienting and attention holding face biases in infancy. Developmental Psychobiology, 63, 461-469. https://doi.org/10.1002/dev.22027
King, J. & Markant, J. (2020). Individual differences in selective attention and scanning dynamics influence children’s learning from relevant non-targets in a visual search task. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 193, 104797. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2019.104797
Markant, J. & Scott, L.S. (2018). Attention and perceptual learning interact in the development of the other-race effect. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 27(3), 163-169. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721418769884
For a complete list of publications: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=CJrblukAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao
