About
Dr. Laura-Ann Petitto & “Solutions for Innovative Minds”

Dr. Laura-Ann Petitto is a Cognitive Neuroscientist and Developmental Cognitive Neuroscientist. She has conducted neuroimaging studies using fMRI/MRI, PET, and functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy brain imaging (fNIRS / NIRx) spanning decades, as well as behavioral basic science studies to understand language acquisition, reading, bilingual language acquisition, sign language acquisition, the development of higher cognition, emotion and social regulation, and learning, in all young children, particularly young deaf visual learners. Most recently, Dr. Petitto was the Science Director as well as the Co-Principal Investigator of the National Science Foundation (NSF) and Gallaudet University’s Science of Learning Center, Visual Language and Visual Learning (VL2) in Washington, D.C. Concurrently, while at Gallaudet, Dr. Petitto was the lead founder of an exciting new Ph.D. degree program in Educational Neuroscience (“PEN”), where she was a full professor and served as Chair (2019-2023). Further at Gallaudet, she was founder and Scientific Director of her own neuroimaging center called Brain and Language Center for Neuroimaging (BL2), and she was founder and director of Gallaudet’s Cognitive Neuroscience Institute (CNI). Prior to Gallaudet, Dr. Petitto’s visionary experimental science contributions and leadership roles include Science Director of cognitive neuroscience laboratories at the University of Toronto (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), Dartmouth College (Hanover, NH), and McGill University (Montreal, Quebec, Canada). There, she also conducted more than a decade of research at the Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI) with the renowned Drs. Brenda Milner, Michael Petrides, and Robert Zatorre. At Dartmouth College, Dr. Petitto was Co-Director of NSF’s “Center for Cognitive and Educational Neuroscience, CCEN,” as well as the founder and Chair (five years) of a new department for undergraduates called Department of Human Development and Educational Neuroscience.

Dr. Petitto’s business consists of face-to-face and online consulting and learning services. Her clients include international and national corporations, governments, policymakers, science, education, and university professionals, including those in art and multimedia venues — especially Artificial Intelligence with Artificial Agents, Avatar and Robots — across the U.S., Canada, Italy, indeed globally. Following from her unique scientific discoveries and knowledge about the development of young children’s language, reading, optimal social-emotional growth and optimal bilingual development, including her pioneering work in the creation of AI avatar and robotic Language Learning Tools, Dr. Petitto’s business further consists of “how to” podcast productions, and book and article writing. The overall purpose of her business is to advance broad dissemination of rare scientific information about how to achieve optimal learning and the enhancement of human brain functions across the lifespan. Her passion is to communicate in ways that are fully accessible for the benefit of a broad public. Presently, she is writing a book to lay bare secrets of the ape and human minds never before revealed.

Dr. Petitto is known for her work on the biological bases of language, reading, and bilingualism, especially involving early language acquisition. Her studies of this topic span 35 years, beginning in the 1970s with her research at Columbia University in which she lived with and attempted to teach sign language to a baby chimpanzee (“Project Nim Chimpsky”). The chimpanzee, “Nim Chimpsky,” was named after Noam Chomsky, the brilliant linguist with whom Dr. Petitto later studied while a graduate student at Harvard University. At Columbia, Petitto pioneered discoveries that showed that chimpanzees, while intelligent, do not possess the linguistic capacities of humans.

More recently, Dr. Petitto is known for her discoveries showing that the neural systems that control sound processing and speech in the brains of hearing people are the same neural systems used by deaf people for processing signed languages.

Legend: The sound phonological segmentation that hearing children engages in during early reading (e.g., child on left) is identical to the visual sign phonological segmentation that the early-sign exposed deaf child engages in (e.g., child on right).

Petitto’s career has been characterized by such innovations in technology. She is known for pushing technologies to advance fundamental questions in science for the benefit of society, including PET, MRI, fMRI, OPTOTRAK, functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS, NIRx; state-of-the-art brain-imaging techniques to study human higher cognition). Especially groundbreaking, she and collaborators have integrated functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (measures higher cognition) with Thermal Infrared Imaging (measures changes in human emotion and emotion regulation), inclusive of an eye- and face-tracking and Motion Capture Technologies. This integrated system was used to build an Artificial Intelligence (AI) Avatar + Robot language learning tool for young babies called “RAVE” (R=Robot, AV=Avatar, thermal, E=Enhanced, language learning tool). RAVE’s use was intended for babies with little exposure to a natural language (“minimal language exposure”) or worse, no natural language exposure at all during the critical brain developmental period of 4-12 months. For example, especially high-risk populations of babies can include children in extremely under-resourced homes and profoundly deaf babies with no exposure to an accessible sign language during this critical period of brain growth and development. (See RAVE link.)

Dr. Petitto received her Masters (1981) and Doctoral (1984) degrees from Harvard University, Department of Human Development and Psychology. She is the recipient of more than 35 international prizes and awards for her scientific discoveries and achievements, including the 1998 Guggenheim Award, Neurosciences Division, for her “unusually distinguished achievements in the past and exceptional promise for future accomplishment in the Neurosciences.” In 2009, Petitto was appointed lifetime Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and, separately, lifetime Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science (APS). See examples of her vibrant science discoveries, publications, and podcasts, as well as the meaningful significance of her science for the good and advancement of society in this website.