Biography

Dr. Koraly Pérez-Edgar is the McCourtney Professor of Child Studies and a Professor of Psychology at Penn State University. Her research examines trajectories of early socioemotional development from infancy through adolescence, focusing on early appearing temperament traits and their impact on the ways children respond to, and engage with, their environment. Dr. Pérez-Edgar has taken a multi-method approach involving direct observation of behavior, cognitive measures, stationary and mobile eye-tracking, psychophysiology, and neuroimaging. Dr. Pérez-Edgar is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science (APS) and the recipient of numerous awards, including a Cattell Sabbatical Award. She is an associate editor at Child Development and Emotion. Dr. Pérez-Edgar is the co-editor with Nathan Fox of Behavioral Inhibition: Integrating Theory, Research, and Clinical Perspectives and co-editor with Vanessa LoBue and Kristin Buss of The Handbook of Emotional Development. She received her A.B. from Dartmouth College and M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University.

Website: www.catlabpsu.com
Twitter: @Dr_Koraly

Attention Mechanisms in Infancy: Building the Brain while Building the Experienced Environment

Session Type: Invited Talk

Abstract

Attention is a central mechanism by which infants select environmental and internal input and create a sense of the world they live in. Systematic attention to salient aspects of the environment leads to a cascade of processes that can characterize the environment as threatening or safe, isolating or supportive. This process is idiosyncratic, such that two children in ostensibly similar environments can have widely varying experiences. The current presentation leverages a large-scale and diverse sample of infants recruited at 4 months of age from three distinct geographic locations and followed at five timepoints until 24 months. Infants provided resting EEG and completed three attention bias tasks. We also assessed temperamental, maternal, and neighborhood characteristics to capture the infant’s proximal and distal environment. Together, these data illustrate how trajectories of neural functioning are shaped by not only the child’s “objective” environment, but also by the experienced environment they are actively creating.

Sub Unit

• Invited Program

Moderator

• Marisa N. Spann, Columbia University

Speaker

• Koraly Elisa Perez-Edgar, Pennsylvania State University, University Park

Introducer

• Lorena Aceves, Child Trends -Maryland