Cutting edge approaches in developmental EEG

Studying EEG during free flowing naturalistic social exchanges
Part 1: Event-related analyses of infant joint attention and emotion-perception

Dr. Lindsay Bowman is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Davis, and Principal Investigator of the Brain and Social Cognition (BASC) Lab. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in Developmental Psychology. With experience as a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Maryland Child Development Lab and as a research fellow in the Labs of Cognitive Neuroscience at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital, her work brings together unique perspectives on neuroscience, cognition, social understanding, and development. Her lab uses a combination of neuroscientific (EEG/ERP) and behavioral methods to understand how cognition develops over infancy and childhood, and how these early developments set the course for social success or impairment. Her most recent work focuses on investigating the neural correlates of social cognition in live-interactive settings, and on how brain development interacts with social experiences in the environment to support emerging complex social behavior.

Latent profile analysis as a data-driven approach to characterize infant baseline Electroencephalography (EEG)

Lara Pierce (she/her) is the director of the Pierce Experience & Development Lab and an Assistant Professor of Psychology at York University. She received her Ph.D. from McGill University and completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Boston Children’s Hospital/Harvard Medical School. Lara uses developmental cognitive neuroscience tools to explore how variation in the early environment impacts the development of neural systems, particularly those supporting language. She aims to a) identify mechanisms by which specific variables (e.g., those associated with socioeconomic variation and early life stress) shape both early neurodevelopment and the early language environment, b) explore the role that individual differences play in the development of language and cognitive abilities, and c) uncover how variation in early neurodevelopment contributes to later learning. She uses tools such as electroencephalography (EEG/ERP), language recordings, and behavioural assessments in infants and children to address these questions.

Studying EEG during free-flowing naturalistic social exchanges
Part 2: Environment-brain and brain-brain entrainment

Prof Sam Wass’s research investigates physiological stress and attention and the inter-relationship between the two during infancy and early childhood. He tries to do this based entirely on naturalistic real-world observations of real-world behaviours, and corresponding fluctuations in physiology and brain activity. To do this he uses methods including naturalistic neuroimaging and home wearables. Sam works with typical development and children from a range of atypical backgrounds, including ADHD, ASD and anxiety. He leads the BabyDevLab (www.uelbabydev.com) at the University of East London