Daphne Maurer
McMaster University
Professor (Associate, Full, Senior Lecturer or above)
Critical Periods Revisited: Lessons from Infants treated for Cataracts
From University to Kindergarten: Getting Vision Screening Started in Ontario
Pretty Ugly: Why we like some songs, faces, foods, plays, pictures, poems, etc., and dislike others (based on book with that title
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Daphne Maurer’s research has focussed on understanding how experience influences normal human development, how those influences are constrained by biology, and the limits of plasticity. To examine these questions she studies visual perception, both its normal development in children with normal eyes and its aberrant development in children born with cataracts too dense to see through. Her work was also central to two groundbreaking science books she wrote with Charles Maurer. The World of the Newborn examines development from the baby’s perspective. It won the book award of the American Psychological Association and has been translated into five languages. Pretty Ugly, just published, starts from basic physics and biology and combines the sciences of perception, neuroscience, and development with anthropology, neuroscience, and the history of the arts, to explain the origins of aesthetic preferences.