Visual and Cognitive Development Project

01/27/2023

https://www.psypost.org/2023/01/longitudinal-study-of-kindergarteners-suggests-spanking-is-harmful-for-childrens-social-competence-67034

A longitudinal study published in the journal Child Abuse & Neglect presents compelling evidence that spanking is detrimental to children’s social development. Children who were exposed to spanking had higher externalizing behavior, lower self-control, and lower interpersonal skills compared to ch...

07/27/2020

Did a short interview with CTV News to discuss our recent finding about infants' ability to discriminate between major and minor modes of a musical key.

Scott Adler associate psychology professor at York University discusses a new study about infants identifying musical tones at young age.

07/06/2020

Some things happening at Project:

1. We are preparing a paper on exciting findings related to being born by c-section and adults' visual attention and brain structure.

2. We are finishing analysis related to using eye movements to measure infants' ability to distinguish between phonemes (the building blocks of language).

3. We are also set to begin preparing a paper on differences in the course of attention development depending on whether one is born by an emergency c-section or a planned one. Findings have some very interesting implications.

Though the Project is currently closed because of the COVID pandemic, we are still hard at work producing exciting scientific findings. We miss all the parents and babies, but hope to be able to Project. welcome to

06/04/2020

05/21/2020

In a new study, set to be published next month in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, we report in collaboration with Dr. Charles Chubb from the University of California at Irvine in a study using a relatively new eye movement paradigm that we developed, that 6-month-old infants are bimodally distributed in their capacity to detect the difference between the major or minor of a musical key. More specifically, only approximately 33% of infants can discriminate the difference between major and minor modes whereas the other 67% cannot. This is consistent with studies with adults and adolescents previously reported by Dr. Chubb. This new study, therefore, suggests that this capacity is innate.

11/27/2019

We have been working hard on our project to investigate the impact of being born by caesarean section relative to being born vaginally. We have submitted a paper to Science and preparing another for publication. In short, these studies have found that the impact of being born by caesarean section persists into adulthood, produces differences in brain networks, and may show different patterns of development depending on whether the c-section is emergency or planned. Will provide more details soon.

04/24/2019

Here is a news clip about the bilingual effect on visual attention study:

A study says babies exposed to more than one language in the home are more attentive than infants who hear only a single language.

04/24/2019

We have been busy at the Project. We have recently published 2 articles. One explores the role of being raised in a bilingual environment on 6-month-old infants' visual attention. The other study explored 6-month-old infants' ability to mentally process and then discriminate predictable events on the basis of a difference of just 500 milliseconds (half a second) in the duration of a visual event.

08/18/2015

Here is the link to the the Toronto Star article about our C-section study that appeared in yesterday's edition.

http://t.thestar.com/ #/article/life/2015/08/14/c-section-babies-slower-to-focus-their-attention-says-study.html

08/13/2015

The c-section study, it's results, and implications will be featured in an article by the Toronto Star on Monday. Today, the Daily Mail in the UK, CBS station in Atlanta, and various medical news, as well as general news outlets around the world have done features on this important finding.

08/12/2015

We have recently published what we believe is a groundbreaking research showing differences between babies born by Caesarean section versus those born vaginally in their ability to move attention to objects and events that occur in their visual world. (If you want to see the original article, let me know and I will post it).

A number of news outlets are doing stories on this finding. Below is the link for the first one, from the Toronto Sun.
http://www.torontosun.com/2015/08/11/c-section-can-impact-babys-ability-to-concentrate-study

07/29/2015

Just had a major groundbreaking finding accepted for publication. The essence of the finding is that babies born by Caesarean section are slower to allocate their visual attention than babies born vaginally. One of the reasons that this finding is impactful is due to the increasing rates of Caesarean section deliveries. This research is being published in Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics. Both the publisher and my university plan on issuing press releases and making a media push for dissemination of this finding.