Mangold International Scientific Council

Wie wir von Mangold International aus weltweiter jahrelanger Projektarbeit wissen, gibt es noch einen großen Handlungsbedarf, um die Videoanalyse zu dem wissenschaftlichen Werkzeug zu entwickeln, das diese sein kann. Wir betrachten es als sehr ehrenwerte Aufgabe, die Entwicklung der Videoanalyse zu forcieren, um hier einen Standard zu erreichen, der bessere Forschungsergebnisse und höheren Nutzen ermöglicht.

Vor diesem Hintergrund gründeten wir das "Mangold Scientific Council" mit dem Ziel, Fortschritte in der Technologie und den Forschungsmethoden der Videoanalyse zu erzielen. Das Scientific Council unterstützt uns dabei, die Potentiale von Werkzeugen wie Videoanalyse, Sequenzanalyse und andere Möglichkeiten der quantitativen und qualitativen Datenanalyse in der wissenschaftlichen Gemeinschaft zu verbreiten.

Jedes Mitglied des Scientific Council hat damit die Chance, wertvolle Erfahrung und Wissen weiterzugeben und somit die Entwicklung und breite Anwendung von professionellen wissenschaftlichen Werkzeugen für bessere Forschungsergebnisse zu fördern.


Roger Bakeman, Prof. emer., PhD

Ph.D, University of Texas at Austin, 1973
Professor Emeritus, Georgia State University, 2007

Georgia State University, Atlanta, USA

Website

Running throughout my work is a concern with social interaction: how it is observed, how it is described, and how it is analyzed. With Lauren B. Adamson I have observed and continue to observe infants and toddlers interacting with their mothers to study how such infants communicate—and how joint attention is transformed—before and as formal language is acquired in typically developing toddlers and toddlers with autism and Down Syndrome. With Josephine V. Brown I have observed preterm and full-term infants and mothers interacting and have studied effects of early interaction patterns on subsequent development. With John M. Gottman (University of Washington) I have written a book, explaining procedural and analytic strategies for observational studies in general. And with Vicenç Quera (University of Barcelona, Spain) I have written articles, books, and computer programs that explore specific analytic strategies for the sequential analysis of systematic observational data.

I have also worked with a number of colleagues, analyzing archives of interview, self-report, medical, and other data, primarily related to health concerns, including AIDS: with John Peterson (GSU) to analyze effects of stress, coping, HIV status, psychosocial resources, and depressive mood in African American gay, bisexual, and heterosexual men; with Julia Perilla (GSU) to analyze effect of domestic violence among Latino couples; with Marianne Celano (Emory University School of Medicine) to study factors affecting interventions with asthmatic children; with Mary Ann Romski (Dept. of Communication, GSU) to study augmented language intervention for toddlers; and with Claire Coles (Emory University School of Medicine) to analyze effects of maternal drug and tobacco use during pregnancy on preterm and full-term infants.

At the undergraduate level, I have taught developmental psychology and psychological statistics, and at the graduate level, I have taught courses in statistical analysis including multiple and logistic regression and structural equation modeling, and developmental and observational methods.

Read more about the Sequential Data Analysis Program GSEQ (Generalized Sequential Querier), developed by Roger Bakeman (Georgia State University) and Vicenç Quera (University of Barcelona)

Kim A. Bard, PhD

University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth, Hampshire, United Kingdom

Website

Dr. Kim A. Bard spent a year in the rain forest in Borneo, Indonesia studying young free-ranging orangutans, as part of her PhD research (awarded 1988 from Georgia State University, GA, USA), In the 1980s, Dr. Bard held 2 postdoctoral posts, one with Prof Dr. Hanus Papousek at the Department of Developmental Psychobiology, Max Planck Institute for Psychiatry, Germany to study intuitive parenting in chimpanzees; and the second with Dr. Stephen J. Suomi at the Laboratory of Comparative Ethology, Poolesville, USA, and Dr Frederick King at Yerkes Research Center, to study bio-behavioural responsivity in chimpanzee infants.

As a Research Scientist at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center of Emory University from 1989, she investigated the roles of emotion and socialization in early development, and designed a Responsive Care Nursery to enhance species-typical development in chimpanzees. In 1998, she held the post of Senior Research Fellow, working with Dr. Eugene Emory in the Department of Psychology at Emory University. In 1999, Dr. Bard became a Senior Lecturer at Portsmouth and in 2002, Director of the Centre for the Study of Emotion and a Reader in Comparative Developmental Psychology. Dr Bard has more than 50 peer-reviewed publications and 29 book chapters (see CV). Dr. Bard is Associate Editor, British Journal of Psychology, and is on the Editorial Boards of International Journal of Comparative Psychology, and Primates. Her affiliation include amongst others the Centre for the Study of Emotion.

Research Interests

Kim Bard has a distinctive perspective, which concerns understanding the process of development in evolution. She conducts empirical studies with an eye to clarifying universal and species-specific characteristics of humans and great apes. Her studies of social cognition suggest that humans and great apes share a large degree of plasticity, especially in early socio-emotional communicative abilities. These social cognitive abilities include intentional and referential communication, and social referencing (i.e., the ability to seek information from a caregiver about novel objects and use that emotional information to regulate behaviour). The study of these abilities across species leads to better understanding of the precursors, contexts, and sequelae of social cognition in human development.

Nancy Darling, PhD

Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio, USA

Website

Adolescent social relations encompass changing relationships with parents and peers, the initiation of romantic relationships, and an expanding social world that includes greater and more unsupervised interactions with the community and a more sophisticated and multidimensional conception of peers. As a developmental psychologist, my research focuses on how adolescents influence and are influenced by these social relationships and how these different social spheres interact to change the course of individual development.

Because many of these processes aren't amenable to experimental manipulation (they don't let you randomly assign parental divorce to adolescents to see how it affects them), I have become particularly interested in two different aspects of the study of psychology: contextual variability and research methods.

Although all scientists work to develop generalizable models, developmental psychologists in particular have focused on looking at lawful variability in basic processes. For example, does severe, strict parenting have the same influence on children living in dangerous urban environments as it does on youth in the suburbs? Does it have similar effects on boys and girls? On youth in the Philippines and the United States? Natural variability in basic processes across different individuals and in different situations provides critical insight into human development and has in some ways substituted for experimental manipulation in aspects of social development not well suited to laboratory study. Interest in contextual variability has led me to study adolescents in Japan, the Philippines, Chile, Italy, and in many different types of communities within the United States. And the complexity of these processes and the need to understand how the development of individuals is embedded in their relationships with others has led to a deep interest in statistics and research methods. Our science is only as good as our models. We are currently using Mangold for observational coding of romantic relationships in adolescence and adulthood and that we are going to be developing it for the study of parent-adolescent conflict.

Gedeon Deák, PhD

University of California, San Diego, USA

Website


Gedeon Deák is a Cognitive Scientist and Developmental Psychologist (PhD, University of Minnesota, 1995) who has been in the department of Cognitive Science and the Human Development Program at UCSD since 1999.

His interests include the following:

How do young children solve problems and control their attention and thinking, especially using instructions and other social cues from adults? In particular, how does the ability to "shift gears" to solve different kinds of problems, or understand different kinds of messages, develop from 3 to 6 years of age? How do underlying brain processes change to support this development?

How do infants learn new social skills for communicating with adults, especially before they can use language? How do patterns of social interactions and social information change from 2 to 24 months of age? How do infants "pick up on" behavior patterns of adults, and use these to predict their future behaviors? How is this learning disrupted in developmental disorders such as autism? Finally, how do these pre-verbal social skills "play forward" into early language development?

Are children particularly good at learning words? Does word learning differ from other kinds of learning? How do children develop the ability to flexibly select words and descriptions to focus a listener's attention on particular topics of interest, and, conversely, how do children learn different words or phrases for related topics?

Dr. Deák can comment on questions about children's thinking and cognitive development; children's learning and early education; language development; infant social interaction and learning; and related topics. He has published peer-reviewed papers in all of these areas.

Hamido Fujita, PhD

Iwate Prefectural University, Iwate, Japan

Website

The Laboratory  is concerned with the development and analysis of  Software Engineering and  Artificial Intelligence Tools including Expert System, Neural Network, Data Mining, Knowledge Discovery, Robotics, Multi-Agent sytem, and Enterprise Modeling.

The Laboratory is part of the Department of Faculty of Software and Information Science at the Iwate Prefectural University.  The motto of our course of information system construction is "Become Edison in software". In the 21st century, which is called software power century, we aim to produce leaders of new generation by researching the core issues.

In this course, we study and educate on modeling of information systems in a company, methodology of local information network systems, new software development techniques for the end-user developing.

Here, we need to solve problems how we construct the best information system for a user by integrating some elements of techniques such as human interface, data base, software, network, from abstracted needs and problems in companies and local society.

As a "prefectural university", we are working on some projects by cooperating with regional government or industries for contributing to residents of this prefecture. In our curriculum on information system construction, students are learning it through practical experience and they investigate and find out a new researching theme. By the practical education, students become to be studying enthusiastically, because they discover new things that were not understandable on the desk.

Our challenge it to solve practical problems in more wide fields by cooperating with variety researchers in medical, social welfare, agriculture etc. For example, we are suggesting "Life Support Network", and we research and develop many issues for realizing this dream. Our target of information system construction is not only in academic or business fields but also in a daily life field. We are working on "local" useful theme and "global" distributing our results to the world wide, we are doing a "glocal" research and education.

Sherryl Goodman, PhD
Sherryl Goodman

Emory University, Atlanta, GA, USA

Ph.D, University of Waterloo, 1978
Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Psychology

Website

Background

Sherryl Goodman is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Psychology at Emory University, Atlanta, GA. She is a licensed practicing psychologist in the State of Georgia. And she is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at Emory University as well as the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Emory University School of Medicine.

Research Interests

Her research interest, grounded in the field of developmental psychopathology, concern the mechanism by which mother with depression may transmit psychopathology to their children. Within a developmental psychopathology perspective, she is particularly interested in risk and protective factors and vulnerabilities to the development of psychopathology. She is also interested in the development of evidence-based approaches to the prevention of perinatal depression and examining the potential benefits to the infants.

Petra Hauf, PhD

Dean of Science, Professor of Psychology 
Canada Research Chair
 

St. Francis Xavier University, Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada   

Website

Dr. Petra Hauf is a professor of psychology at StFX. and a Canada Research Chair in Culture and Human Development. She is a researcher in infant cognitive development focusing on the development of action production and understanding. She has a PhD in psychology from Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt, and previously worked as a senior research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Munich, Germany. Prior to coming to Canada, she was an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Frankfurt .

Dr. Hauf currently collaborates with numerous research scientists who work at high profile universities and research institutes in North America and Europe. These collaborations include work with Josep Call of the Max-Planck-Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany, Claes von Hofsten and Kerstin Rosander from Uppsala University in Sweden, Gustaf Gredebäck of the University of Oslo, Norway, Martin Giese of the University of Wales in Bangor, UK, Viktor Sarris and Helmut Prior from Goethe University in Germany and Renee Baillargeon of the University of Illinois, USA.

“My primary research interest is the early development of action understanding. I am particularly interested in infant action control, infant understanding of actions performed by others and how these two aspects are related to each other during early development. This interest is based upon the question how infants come to understand own and actions of others. Do they need to be able to produce an action by their own before they are able to understand actions of others? Or do they first understand actions of others and afterward figure out that they are able to produce these actions by their own?

In order to investigate this topic I am focusing on perceptual and motor development during the first year of life. Additional I am interested in biological movements like crawling or walking. How do infants discover movements in their environment? And how is this discovery related to own motor capacities? Currently, I am using novel eye tracking technology combined with imitation paradigms in order to investigate these issues. My other research interests are the role of action effects in action control, detection of movement contingencies in early infancy, and the influence of tactile experience on the perception of physical events."

Mechthild Papoušek, Prof. emer., Dr. med

Munich, Germany

MD (1966), Specialization in Adult Psychiatry and Neurology (1974)

Prof. of Developmental Psychobiology (1993)

Research fellowships at Harvard Medical School (1971/2) and NICHD, Bethesda, MD (1985/6)

1976-1988 Research psychiatrist at the Max-Planck Institute for Psychiatry, Munich

1991 to 2005 head of the Munich Interdisciplinary Research and Intervention Program for Fussy Babies, Institute of Social Pediatrics and Youth Medicine, University of Munich

1993 Arnold-Lucius-Gesell Prize at the University of Munich (1993), together with my husband Hanuš Papoušek

Member of ISIS, SRCD, WAIMH, and founding member and first president (1996-2000) of the German-speaking Association for Infant Mental Health GAIMH.

My personal involvement with behavioral microanalysis began in the mid seventies when I joined my husband at the Max-Planck-Institute for twelve years of intense collaborative research with a major interest in preverbal parent-infant communication, vocal development, beginnings of musical development and play, infant-directed speech, and intuitive parenting. Behavioral observation, video- and audiorecordings of parent-infant interactions and microanalysis to the minute reciprocities of preverbal communication were center stage in our approach.

1991, after my husband’s retirement, I got a chance to establish a clinical program for infants and their families suffering from disorders of behavioral and emotional regulation and troubled parent-infant relationships. Again, behavioral analyses of video-recorded parent-infant interactions in a variety of interactional contexts played a key role in both diagnostic assessments and intervention. The program combines scientific and applied clinical approaches to preverbal regulatory disorders and other risks of infant mental health, including infant neglect and abuse, prenatal stress, maternal mental illness, attachment and relationship disorders.

Since 1993 the program includes an interdisciplinary training program for infant mental health professionals in video-supported interaction guidance and parent-infant-psychotherapy. Together with my husband, we received the Arnold-Lucius-Gesell Prize at the University of Munich (1993).

It was a great pleasure and a unique opportunity to have met Pascal Mangold at a time when he just started a first version of the INTERACT Program. Ever since that time we kept appreciating his friendship and support and his readiness to tailor his program to our scientific and clinical needs.



Publications:

More than 180 scientific articles and chapters in national and international journals and books.

Papoušek, H., Jürgens, U., & Papoušek, M. (1992). Nonverbal vocal communication : Comparative and developmental approaches. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Papoušek., M. (1994): Vom ersten Schrei zum ersten Wort: Anfänge der Sprachentwicklung in der vorsprachlichen Kommunikation. Bern: Huber.

Papoušek, M. und A. von Gontard (2003). Spiel und Kreativität in der frühen Kindheit. Stuttgart: Pfeiffer bei Klett-Cotta

Papoušek, M., M Schieche und H. Wurmser (2004). Regulationsstörungen der frühen Kindheit: Frühe Risiken - frühe Hilfen. Bilanz aus 10 Jahren Münchner Sprechstunde für Schreibabys. Bern: Huber Verlag

Jonathan P. San Diego, Dr.

London Knowledge Lab, London, United Kingdom

Website

Dr Jonathan P. San Diego is a Lecturer in Educational Technology and Healthcare Informatics at the Faculty of Dentistry, Oral & Craniofacial Sciences. He is recognised Fellow Higher Education Academy in the United Kingdome and a Fellow of Centre for Distance Education, University of London. His main research interests are examining how digital technologies influence cognition, reasoning and learning, particularly on how new technologies affect students’ understanding and knowledge in the healthcare education context.

* Impact of digital and social media on healthcare profession and education – current projects on digital professionalism.
* Haptics, virtual reality and simulation – including the award-winning hapTEL project which focuses on enhancing learners’ 3D perceptions, manipulations and skills; and the Virtual Reality project for surgical procedures which is, informing future researchers and developers how advanced haptic technologies should be applied to teaching, learning and training in clinical settings;
* Blended and open learning – designing and evaluating educational resources for distance learning and the development approaches adopted by academics and professionals.  
* Digital approaches to analysing learning interactions – taking advantage of digital data from computer interactions such as video capture; computer logs and web analytics; touch input and haptic interactions; eye-movements; biometric and physiological measures.

His current leadership role as the Director of the iTEL Hub (Informatics and Technology Enhanced Learning Hub – iTEL Hub) for both the Faculty of Dentistry, Oral & Craniofacial Sciences, and the Florence Nightingale Faculty of Nursing, Midwifery &Palliative Care at King’s College London involves leading the strategic development of digital education. Dr San Diego is an experienced learning scientist with a demonstrated history of working in education research and teaching at different levels. He is highly skilled in E-Learning, pedagogy and learning design; health informatics.  He has over 25 years teaching experience and has been at the cutting edge of the use of educational technologies throughout his career.

Crickette Sanz, PhD

Goualougo Triangle Chimpanzee Project, Republic of Congo

Website

Dr. Crickette Sanz, a native of Bow, Wash., earned her bachelor’s degree in psychology (magna cum laude) in 1997 and her masters degree in experimental psychology in 1999 from CWU, where she also served as an assistant at the university’s Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute (CHCI).

After she earned her PhD in anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis, Sanz went to the remote location hundreds of miles away from the nearest African village in northern Republic of Congo to study chimpanzees in the wild, along with Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) field researcher David Morgan, the founder of the study site.

The WCS goal was to keep researchers out of the central African rain forests for as long as possible. But, when the pristine forests of the Goualougo Triangle and its chimpanzees were threatened by logging, Morgan was sent in to document the biological significance of the area.

Based on their experiences, Sanz and Morgan wrote an article that is published in the „International Journal of Primatology.“

„During our research, we never encountered any other humans or even their traces, such as villages, campsites or paths,“ Sanz says. „Because of low human density in the northern Congo and the remote location of the Goualougo Triangle, it’s unlikely that these chimpanzees had ever encountered humans.“

Typically, chimps in the wild need to be habituated to the presence of humans, which is a process that can take more than ten years. But, instead of running and hiding, these chimpanzees stared, crouched and moved closer to get a better view, slapped tree trunks or threw branches down to get a response and made inquisitive vocalizations. While conducting their on-going research, Sanz and Morgan minimize their presence in the forest as much as possible.

„Our camp is very basic and consists of only a few tents,“ Sanz notes. „We do not cut additional trails in the forests, but instead followed existing animal paths and only use pruning shears to cut back vegetation. And also, we have very strict protocols for observing the chimpanzees.“

After discovering this naive chimpanzee population and their trust in humans -- as well as having other naive contacts with other primate species like gorillas and monkeys that could also be vulnerable to poachers and logging -- Sanz says there is an obligation to ensure the long-term protection of this unique area.

These encounters with the chimpanzees now put the Goualougo Triangle at the top of the priority conservation projects in the Congo Basin, according to Morgan.

Carsten C. Schermuly, Dr.

SRH University Berlin, Germany

Website

As a Professor at SRH University Berlin, Carsten C. Schermuly is interested in interaction processes in teams, leadership, and psychological empowerment. He has studied psychology (major subject), history, politics, and law in Mainz and Berlin (Humboldt University). With Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Scholl (Humboldt University Berlin), he has developed the Discussion Coding System (DCS). During the past years he has been researching at Humboldt University Berlin and Technical University Braunschweig.

He is Director of Studies for Business Psychology at SRH University Berlin since 2012.


Publications:

Schröder, T., Netzel, J., Schermuly, C. C., & Scholl, W. (2012, advanced online publication). Culture-constrained affective consistency of interpersonal behavior. A test of affect control theory with nonverbal expressions. Social Psychology.

Schermuly, C. C., & Scholl, W. (2012). The Discussion Coding System (DCS). A new instrument for analyzing communication processes. Communication Methods and Measures, 6, 12-40.

Meyer, B. & Schermuly, C. C. (2012). When beliefs are not enough: Examining the interaction of diversity faultlines, task motivation, and diversity beliefs on team performance. European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, 21, 456-487.

Meyer, B., Shemla, M., & Schermuly, C. C. (2011). Social category salience moderates the effect of diversity faultlines on information elaboration. Small Group Research, 42, 257-282.

Jens Siemon, Dr.

University of Hamburg, Germany
 

Department of Professional Education and Lifelong Learning

Website

Jens Siemon is Professor (W3) for Education with a focus on Business Education, Media Professions and Vocational Informatics at Universität Hamburg. He is Head of the Department of Professional Education and Lifelong Learning.

On his way to his current position, the most important milestones were set by the unique German vocational education system. Jens obtained his secondary school leaving certificate at Technisches Gymnasium (technical secondary school) in Göttingen.

After completing a dual vocational training in data processing in a small IT company in Northeim, he stayed with the same company for two more years working as a system analyst in a branch office in Aurich. During that time, he became a trainer and obtained the training qualification from the Chamber of Industry and Commerce in 1991.In 1992, Jens started studying Business Education with Spanish as a second subject, specializing in Business Informatics. After completing his studies, he remained at Georg-August-Universität Göttingen and obtained his doctorate (Dr. rer. pol.) in 2002.

Dr. Siemon accepted a Junior Professorship for Vocational and Business Education at Universität Hamburg that same year. In 2009, he was appointed Professor (W3) in Education at the same university. In 1992/92, Siemon studied romance philology and business administration at Universidad de Granada for one year. As a young researcher, he spent time at the Universities of Barcelona and Lleida funded by an EU grant. As a sub-project coordinator, he contributed his competences acquired in Spain to a project funded by the 5th EU Research Framework Programme.

He regularly gives lectures at conferences and delivers expert opinions for them. In 2011/12, he spent a research semester at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. He maintains close relations to diverse research institutes and institutions. His research interest lies in the fields of learning and instruction, especially with regard to lessons and video analysis, game-based learning, the transition from secondary to vocational training and work and the role of vocational education in a knowledge-based society. Jens Siemon has initiated and completed various projects within those fields. By now, he has been directly involved in raising more than 6 million € from third-party-funds.

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Werner Stadlmayr, Dr. med.

Dept. Obstetrics and Gynecology, University of Berne, Berne, Switzerland

Website

As a clinically working obstetrician as well as a psycho analytically trained psychotherapist I am interested in all aspects concerning pregnancy, childbirth, and the postpartum time, attempting to develop an integrated view to biological and psychosocial dynamics in this field.

I came into research in the late 1990’s focusing on qualitative content analysis, first, to understand the explicit, and even more important, the implicit messages between the lines in written text, and then, in oral communications, like in videotaped semi-standardized interviews, evaluating a woman’s birth experience 48 – 96 hours postpartum.

Hypothesizing that the interaction between a new mother and her newborn infant might be affected by the birth experience and the way it is processed thereafter I became aware that no methods had been developed to time, assessing mother-infant interaction in the period before 6-8 weeks postpartum. Thus, in a cross-sectional project, we started to observe new mothers in a standardized breast- or bottle-feeding situation three weeks after childbirth.

At the same time I became familiar with the model of triadic family interaction, as developed by researchers from Lausanne, (Fivaz-Depeursinage E. and Corboz-Warnery A., et al.) and Basel (Bürgin D. and von Klitzing K, et al.), both Switzerland, providing additional information compared with the exclusive assessment of dyads, like in mother-infant or mother-father interaction. However, like in dyads, no methods on triadic interaction covering the period before 6 weeks postpartum were available, and our work group started to assess the parent-infant-triad using a standardized diaper-change-play (DCP) at week 3 postpartum.

Furthermore, given the prenatal roots of postnatal interaction behavior, our work group started to develop an assessment tool evaluating a couple’s prenatal triadic capacity when confronted with its unborn infant as represented by ultrasound pictures in week 20 of gestation (TC_sono20); this part of our research is done in collaboration with Dr. Ch. F. Boukydis, Chicago, USA, a specialist in prenatal mother-infant (dyadic) attachment research. In addition to the assessment of mother-infant interaction after term deliveries we are also working on the evaluation of mother-infant-interaction in the kangaroo-situation after premature birth.

Our approach to the methodological areas described comprises, first, qualitative content analysis of written text and oral communications, second, clinical macro-analytic evaluation of behavior, and third, the microanalysis of behavior, not easily accessible to observation without additional tools. Using INTERACT allows us the integrated analysis of verbal and non-verbal communication on a micro-level.

The above described methods and approaches have been integrated in the longitudinal long-term study ‘Triadic Family Functioning – an integrated approach to obstetrics and infant development’ within the NCCR ‘Swiss Etiological Study on Adjustment and Mental Health’. In the framework of sesam we are integrated into a network of collaborating researchers.

Catherine Tamis-LeMonda, PhD

New York University, New York, USA

Website

Education

1983 - New York University, B.A. (magna cum laude).

1987 - New York University, Graduate School of Arts and Science, Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology with Concentration in Developmental Psychology.


Academic Positions

2002-Present Full Professor, New York University, Department of Applied Psychology

1997-2002 Associate Professor New York University, Department of Applied Psychology

1991-1997 Assistant Professor, New York University, Department of Applied Psychology

1988-1991 Research Assistant Professor, New York University, Department of Psychology


Research Focus

My research is focused on the cultural and social contexts of language, cognitive and social development in infants' first years of life. How do infants' interactions with mothers, fathers and other members of their families and social networks affect their learning trajectories and later school readiness? How might paths to developmental outcomes differ across communities that vary in cultural priorities and parenting practices? Through longitudinal inquiry my students and I follow infants from birth through preschool, visiting babies and families in their homes, schools and communities using naturalistic observations, interviews and direct assessments of development.

Our goal is to advance a richer understanding of how learning unfolds in different cultural and ethnic groups in the U.S. as well as internationally. This naturalistic research is coupled with laboratory investigations (with colleague Karen Adolph), in which we also examine how infants come to understand and recognize that others are useful sources of social information. Infants are tested in novel locomotor situations, where we examine their bids to others for assistance and information about how to act under situations of uncertainty and risk.

Together, the work I conduct in naturalistic and laboratory settings promises to inform theories about the ways in which infants and parents negotiate meaning through everyday social exchanges.