David N. Tompkins
Hello! I am a PhD Candidate at Cornell University, in the Play and Learning lab, studying with Dr. Marianella Casasola. I am currently working as a research assistant with the Cornell Action Research Collaborative on a project with the NY State Council on Children and Families' Pyramid Model implementation team.
My research centers on building a useful, coherent understanding of development, particularly as it relates to early spatial development. Development as studied and development in the real world are not the same - my work attempts to shorten that gap.
This involves empirical work, especially in the toddler data-desert, methodological work, and meta-theoretical work relating to major threats to coherency in our field (e.g., contextual change and differences).
My topics of study are well reflected in these two posters, presented at CDS 2026. I spoke about historical time at JPS in May, and will be discussing visual preference research with infants/toddlers at ICIS in July.
Send me an email if you'd like to chat!
Research Interests
Cognitive development, mental rotation, spatial cognition, historical change and generalizability in developmental science
Publications & Presentations
Tompkins, D. N., Beckner, A. G., Pham, V. T., LoBue, V., Oakes, L. M., & Casasola, M. (2025). Examining young children's mental rotation through two modalities of a staircase mental rotation task. Poster presented at the biennial meeting for the Society for Research in Child Development, Minneapolis, MN.
Pham, V. T., Tompkins, D. N., Beckner, A. G., Alperin, G., Ye, J., Casasola, M., LoBue, V., & Oakes, L. M. (2025). "Can you touch which one changed?" Assessing visual short-term memory in toddlers using a touchscreen. Poster presented at the biennial meeting for the Society for Research in Child Development, Minneapolis, MN.
Trujillo, R., Beckner, A. G., Tompkins, D. N., LoBue, V., Oakes, L., & Casasola, M. (2024). An adaptive touchscreen task to assess young children's mental rotation. Poster presented at the biennial meeting of the Cognitive Development Society, Pasadena, CA.
Tompkins, D. N., Beckner, A. G., Bambha, V. P., LoBue, V., Oakes, L. M., & Casasola, M. (2024). Robots among children: Comparing child and GPT-4 performance on a global-local processing task. Poster presented at the meeting of the Cognitive Development Society, Pasadena, CA.
Beckner, A. G., Simpson, M., Tompkins, D., LoBue, V., Oakes, L. M., & Casasola, M. (2023). A novel eyetracking task to assess mental rotation from infancy to early childhood. Poster presented at the Annual Vision Science Society Meeting, St. Pete Beach, FL.
Beckner, A. G., Katz, M., Tompkins, D., Voss, A. T., Winebrake, D., LoBue, V., Oakes, L. M., & Casasola, M. (2023). A Novel Approach to Assessing Infant and Child Mental Rotation. Journal of Intelligence, 11(8), Article 8.
Tompkins, D., Radulescu, M., Jagid, N., Portnoy, M., Abii, O., Man, B., Voss, A., LoBue, V., Oakes, L. M., & Casasola, M. (2022). The Development and Testing of a Novel Face Controlled Experimental Tool for Toddlers and Young Children. Cognitive Development Society Biennial Meeting, Madison, WI.
Bambha, V. P., Beckner, A. G., Pochinki, N., Tompkins, D., LoBue, V., Oakes, L. M., & Casasola, M. (2022). Putting the Pieces Together: Early spatial problem-solving in the context of puzzle play. SRCD Special Topic Meeting: Learning through Play and Imagination, St. Louis, MO.
Tompkins, D., Guevara, V., Portnoy, M., Kushnir, T., & Casasola, M. (2021). Do Spatial Labels Facilitate Children's 2D-to-3D Transfer of Relational Information in a Spatial Mapping Task?. Society for Research in Child Development, Virtual Conference.
Hobby Projects
playnarrator.com
AI-powered role-playing game built with React, Node, Firebase, and generative AI models for text, images, and audio.
gifshift.xyz
End-to-end processing pipeline to convert characters and styles in popular GIFs. Built with Next.js and Tailwind.