Current Projects

Emotion and Race Perception Study

This study will help us to understand the development of brain processes that allow us to identify emotions using both behavioral and electrophysiological techniques. We will examine if 5-10 month old infants and adults can associate an emotion expressed by a female face with a sound expressing the same emotion. In addition, we will explore if race mediates this ability by incorporating faces of Caucasian and African-American females. Previous research suggests that as infants gain more visual and auditory experience there is a decreased ability to tell the difference between certain types of unfamiliar faces (such as other-race or other-species faces). Consequentially, as infants grow older they may be better at making distinctions among faces and vocalizations of their own race than of another race. In this study, we will record brain activity and track visual looking preferences as the infants are exposed to sounds expressing emotions, followed by faces expressing the same or different emotion.

The Development of Multimodal Perception

Research on visual perception and auditory perception is typically conducted in a modality specific fashion. However, people, objects, and events can be identified across multiple modalities. People recognize their friends by their physical appearance and movements or even just their voice. At the supermarket one selects fruits by both looking at the color and feeling for ripeness. Our environment constantly bombards the five senses with an onslaught of detail about multiple events happening concurrently in the world around us. How is all of this multimodal information sorted and integrated in adults and how do infants develop the ability to use multimodal information to learn about the surrounding world? Here, it is hypothesized that the early ability to detect correlations between auditory and visual stimuli provides infants with a powerful tool for perceiving and organizing information. This research is designed to determine whether the redundancy of co-occurring visual and auditory information enhances processing above and beyond processing in response to a single modality and how this changes within the first year of life as compared to in adulthood.

Visual Perceptual Narrowing Study - Faces

This study is designed to further our understanding about the development of visual perceptual abilities within the first year of life. Previous research suggests that 6-month-old infants have an increased ability to discriminate certain types of faces (e.g. they can tell the difference between two monkey faces of the same species) compared to 9-month-olds and adults. This phenomenon is called perceptual narrowing and is characterized by a decrease in the ability to individuate and discriminate faces not common in the infant’s visual environment. This study seeks to further understand visual perceptual narrowing by bringing infants into the lab at 6-months-of age and testing their ability to discriminate different kinds of faces by recording brain activity and their visual looking preferences. Then infants and their parents are sent home with a picture book of faces for them to read over the next 3 months. Finally infants are brought back into the laboratory at 9 months and are again testing on their ability to discriminate different kinds of faces, including faces that were in the book. We hope that this study will help us further understand the role of early visual experience in brain development.

Visual Perceptual Narrowing Study - Objects

This study is a follow-up study to our previous perceptual narrowing study using monkey faces. This study will further our understanding about the development of visual perceptual abilities within the first year of life. Specifically, we are interested in determining whether labeling objects similar to how we label faces (i.e. each object has it’s own individual name) influences the development of the ability to recognize and categorize objects. Infants will come into the laboratory at 6-months and testing using both measures of looking time and by recording brain activity and then they will be sent home with a picture book of objects. At 9-months infants will be brought back into the lab and tested on their ability to remember objects from the book and their ability to learn new objects. The results from this study will help us understand how infant learn to categorize objects in the surrounding world.