Sean Duffy, Assistant Professor of Psychology, received his BA, MA, and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. Prior to working at Rutgers, he was a research fellow at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research, a visiting scholar at Kyoto University in Japan, and a postdoctoral fellow of the International Max Planck Research School on Evolutionary and Ontogenetic Dynamics in Berlin, Germany.

Courses:
The Psychology of Childhood
Method and Theory in Psychology
Introduction to Childhood Studies (Spring, 2006)

>>> for more information, check out Dr. Duffy's website

Dr. Duffy conducts research in several areas. One line concerns the development of spatial perception and quantitative reasoning in infants and young children, specifically the ability to encode information about an object's size. Another set of studies explores the cultural context of human development by examining similarities and divergences in the development of various cognitive and social processes in East Asian and North American cultures. Finally, Duffy's research on the development of memory elaborates upon a statistical model of how humans use prior knowledge stored in categories to maximize accuracy in estimation.

Journal Articles:
Huttenlocher, J., Duffy, S., & Levine, S. (2002). Infants and toddlers discriminate amount: Are they measuring? Psychological  Science,  13, 244-249.

Kitayama, S., Duffy, S., Kawamura, T., & Larsen, J. T. (2003).  Perceiving an object and its context in two cultures: A cultural look at New Look. Psychological  Science, 14, 201-206.

Duffy, S., Huttenlocher, J., & Levine, S. (2005). It’s all relative: How young children encode extent Journal of Cognition and Development, 6, 51-63.

Duffy, S., Huttenlocher, J., Levine, S., & Duffy, R. (2005). How infants encode spatial extent. Infancy, 7,  81-90.

Duffy, S., Huttenlocher, J., & Crawford, L.E. (2006). Children use categories to maximize accuracy in estimation. Developmental Science, 9, 598-604.

Book Chapters:
Kitayama, S., & Duffy, S. (2004). Cultural competence - tacit, yet fundamental: Self, social relations, and cognition in the U.S. and Japan. In R. Sternberg & E. Grigorenko (Eds.) Culture and competence: Contexts of life success, (pp. 55-87). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Kitayama, S., Duffy, S., & Uchida, Y. K. (2006). Self as cultural mode of being. In  S. Kitayama & D. Cohen (Eds.) The Handbook of Cultural Psychology New York: Guilford Press.

Duffy, S. (2007). Psychology. To appear in V. Bowman (Ed.) Scholarly Resources for Children and Childhood Studies. Maryland: Scarecrow Press.

Submitted / In preparation
Duffy, S., & Kitayama, S. (revised). Mnemonic context effect in two cultures: An examination of culturally contingent attention strategies.

Duffy, S, Huttenlocher, J., & Crawford, L. E. (revised). Children use categories to maximize accuracy in memory.

Huttenlocher, J., Vasilyeva, M., Newcombe, N., & Duffy, S. (revised). Developing symbolic capacities one step at a time.

Duffy, S.  (submitted). How much or how many: Adult estimation and discrimination of discrete and continuous quantities.

Duffy, S., Huttenlocher, J., & Hedges, L. V. (in preparation). Effects of category structure on stimulus estimation: The case of skewed stimulus frequency distributions

Duffy, S., Uchida, Y.K., Imada, T., Toriyama, R., & Itakura, S. (in preparation) Children's books in Japan and the U.S.: A study of the transmission of cultural values.

Duffy, S., Uchida, Y. K., & Kitayama, S. (in preparation) A cross-cultural comparison of the structure of friendship networks in Japan and the U.S.

Huttenlocher, J., Duffy, S., & Levine, S. Young children encode extent: Are they measuring? Paper presented at the Society for Research in Child Development biennial meeting in Minneapolis, MN. April, 2001.

Duffy, S., Huttenlocher, J., & Levine, S. Young children's use of relational information for discriminating continuous quantities. Poster presented at the Society for Research in Child Development biennial meeting in Minneapolis, MN. April, 2001.

Duffy, S., Huttenlocher, J., Levine, S., & Duffy, R. Sensitivity to spatial extent in infants and young children. Poster presented at the Society for Research in Child Development biennial meeting in Tampa Bay, FL., April, 2003.

Duffy, S., Huttenlocher, J., & Crawford, L. E. Young children’s use of categories in stimulus estimation. Poster presented at the Society for Research in Child Development biennial meeting in Tampa Bay, FL., April 2003.

Duffy, S. Seeing through cultures: Size estimation in the U.S. and Japan. Talk at the Lifecourse and Ontogenetic Dynamics conference at the Max Plank Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany, October, 2003.

Duffy, S., & Kitayama, S. Cultural differences in the use of categories for stimulus estimation. Poster presented at Kyoto International Symposium, University of Michigan, December, 2003.

Toriyama, R., Duffy, S., Itakura, S., & Kitayama, S. The development of culture-contingent attention: The framed line task in 4 and 5 year-old children. Poster presented at Kyoto International Symposium, University of Michigan, December, 2003.

Duffy, S. Culture and friendship. Talk presented at the Lifecourse and Ontogenetic Dynamics conference in Ann Arbor, MI, April, 2004.

Duffy, S. Culture, friendship, and social support: Empirical findings on social relationships and social support in Japan and the U.S. Talk presented at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, Germany, October, 2004.