Ty Boyer earned a BS in Psychology from the Barrett Honors College at Arizona State University in 2000, and an MA and PhD in Developmental Psychology from the University of Maryland in 2002 and 2005. He then spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow in the University of Chicago Department of Psychology, followed by several years as a research associate in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Indiana University. His general areas of research are perceptual and cognitive development, with more specific focus on how people gather information from their surrounding, oftentimes social, contexts, contrast these percepts with preexisting representations, and form expectations that guide actions, and how these processes change with neural maturation and experience. He has conducted studies on the development of interpersonal action understanding, numerical and probabilistic reasoning, and decision-making processes and risk-taking tendencies. The age groups analyzed in this research program vary significantly with the question guiding the work; some of the research is conducted with infants, some with young children, elementary school aged children, adolescents, and some is done with adults. His teaching interests are primarily in research methods, child psychology, infancy, cognition, and developmental cognitive neuroscience.