> projects
Data quality and power in infant research
Infant research is difficult and expensive, resulting in a field that has been historically underpowered. With Drs. Mijke Rhemtulla and Lisa Oakes, I have studied how various aspects of data quality, variability, and sample size impact our ability to detect an effect (i.e., statistical power) in infant samples. The overarching goal is to provide researchers with the tools to maximize research and recruitment efforts and to further advance infant methodology and reproducibility.
Read the published paper here and access the open code here!
The Mazira Project
In collaboration with a large research team led by Dr. Elizabeth Prado, Dr. Lisa Oakes and I have developed procedures to be used in this longitudinal study designed to evaluate impacts on child cognitive development and biomarkers of nutrition and health in the Mangochi District of Malawi. Read the published clinical trial paper here!
In addition, we collected longitudinal data from a sample of infants living in the Sacramento Valley using the same set of measures collected in Malawi to understand the similarities and differences between two groups of infants with very different lived experiences. Watch a presentation of the preliminary results from this sub-study here!
The effects of face masks on infants’ face processing
From birth, infants preferentially look to the faces in their environment. Across the first year of life, infants increasingly learn to recognize faces using different visual cues, such as the eyes or mouth As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, face masks have become a part of daily life for many Americans, raising the question: what impact will face masks have on our ability to remember and recognize others faces?
In an eye tracking study, we asked whether infants would also show differential learning and recognition patterns while viewing masked and unmasked faces. This work is currently under review and will be published soon!
