Projects

Current Projects

Newborn Cognitive and Motor Development

Some infants are at an increased risk for developmental differences throughout their lifetime, including basic measures of infant growth, deficits in spatial attention, social and emotional processes, information processing speed, motor performance, and neurobehavior. Our project is interested in whether prenatal opioid and/or other substance exposures are associated with meaningful developmental differences. We hope this research will contribute to early identification of infants at risk for delays and inform future intervention efforts. 

NOWS Database

Early Interventionists

Our Procedures

Eye-tracking

Infant visual attention is one of the most fundamental aspects of infant learning, as preverbal infants learn almost everything about the world through their eyes. By understanding what grabs and holds your baby's attention, we can begin to unravel the marvels of infant learning. By using eye-tracking technology, we can measure where your baby is looking, how quickly they move their eyes, and how long they look. By examining these aspects of infant visual attention, we hope to gain a better understanding of how attention influences memory and learning.

This is an example of performance during an eye-tracking task. The red circle represents where the participant was looking--the larger the circle, the longer the participant looked to that specific location. Advancements in visual eye tracking technology have allowed researchers to ask all kinds of exciting new questions!

Motor Development

Our lab is currently completing a meta-analysis of motor interventions using the Test of Infant Motor Performance (TIMP) as an outcome measure. We have registered the protocol using PROSPERO (CRD42023414447). Links to supporting documents related to the meta-analysis will be available here. 

Full list of all studies included in the meta-analysis.