Oakes's research has focused on how infants come to understand the world. She has focused on how they learn to perceive causality and categorize objects how their ability to direct attention becomes more sophisticated over development, and how they develop the ability to store and use information in
working memory. Her general theoretical view is that development is a set of cascading interactions between the environment and the infant, in which the infant's developing psychological and physical abilities impact the input they receive from the environment (e.g., the ability to sit changes the visual input), and the environmental inputs then impact further development. As Editor-in-Chief of
Infancy, she has stressed the importance of conducting research with infants from a broad range of societies and cultures across the globe She has argued that it is not useful to study the development of individual cognitive processes in isolation with the hope that the resulting theories can later be integrated; this leads to what she called the “
Humpty Dumpty problem,” in which the pieces corresponding to the individual processes cannot easily be put back together again. She has also been a leader in developing and using eye tracking methods in infancy and has promoted best practices for quantifying and optimizing statistical power in infant research. == Awards and honors ==