Emilio Ferrer - US grants

The purpose of this project is to develop mathematical and statistical models for examining the dynamics of dyadic interactions. Although most theories of social relations describe interactions as dynamic processes, many of their theoretical hypotheses remain untested because of a lack of statistical models that are capable of capturing such processes over time. The proposed research addresses this shortcoming by developing and comparing alternative state-of-the-art mathematical and statistical models that can capture the dynamics of interactions in dyads, as these interactions evolve over time. These models will be applied to data collected from couples at multiple time points to study affective processes and emotion regulation, to test hypotheses derived from psychological and sociological theories regarding relationship quality and instability over time. Finally, the developed models will be applied to other types of dyads (e.g., infant-caregiver), other systems of two elements (e.g., cognition-emotion), and more complex social systems (e.g., infant-mother-father triad). The use of the developed models to evaluate hypotheses derived from both psychological and sociological theories should enhance the understanding of dyadic interactions and will broaden the development of theory in this area. In addition to the advancement in models for dyadic interactions, the proposed work presents several broader impacts. These include research training of graduate and undergraduate students (including underrepresented minorities), dissemination of research through publications in scientific journals, integration of methodological and substantive results into the academic curriculum, and the possibility of applying some of the developed models to clinical settings, for example in the evaluation and prediction of relationship quality and stability over time.

Every day, infants encounter an enormous amount of new information. Every new object, person, or place introduces new sights, sounds, and experiences to interpret, learn, and remember. Infants are remarkably good at learning new information, especially when it occurs during interactions with parents or caregivers. Many times each day, adults point out and name new objects in books or in the environment, talk to infants about those objects, and describe how objects are similar or different. Research has shown that this type of interaction helps older children learn about the world around them. This project is aimed at understanding the kind of support for learning (often referred to as scaffolding) that parents provide for their infants, and how this scaffolding actually helps infants learn.

Eight- to fourteen-month-old infants and their parents will engage in a picture-book reading task that involves introducing two novel object categories. The instructional strategies used by parents and the dynamics of these interactions will be analyzed. Infant category learning will be subsequently tested using a paired-comparison novelty preference paradigm. In a follow-up study, instructional strategies will be experimentally manipulated to test predictions regarding optimal learning conditions. Thus, this project will allow understanding of how parents' strategies facilitate infants' learning of specific features of the world.

This work not only provides insight into how infants learn, but may also inform ways in which parents or caregivers can better structure learning contexts for infants at risk for later problems. The results of this work will be broadly disseminated, not only in the scientific community, but also to parents and childcare professionals through social and traditional media, lectures given to parenting groups, and participation in the Yolo County Child Development Conference.

How do people learn large-scale spaces, like new towns and cities that they visit, as they navigate? Addressing this question poses surprising obstacles, such as the difficulty in optimizing large-scale spaces for experimental testing and controlling for pre-existing knowledge. Desktop virtual reality offers one possible way to address this question, although such testing offers an incomplete rendition of the full-body, immersive experience that is real-world navigation. Researchers will develop a 2-D treadmill coupled with a head-mounted display to allow free ambulation of large-scale virtual spaces. Successful development of this device has important societal applications. For example, pre-training with enriched body-based cues has the potential to increase knowledge transfer to real world environments, which could be helpful for training individuals such as first-responders and navigation in wilderness environments. Also, the device and proposed experiments will provide a completely novel understanding of the neural basis of human spatial navigation with body-based cues, fundamental to accurately modeling spatial cognition and understanding why we often get lost when we visit new cities.

Almost all theories of the neural basis of spatial navigation, largely developed in freely navigating rodents, assume the critical importance of importance of body-based cues to this code. Yet the vast majority of studies in humans involve navigation in desktop virtual reality. The novel device that will be developed will permit 2-D locomotion-based VR navigation, allowing a full range of body/head rotations and ambulation. The experiments will determine 1) the contributions of body-based input to human spatial navigation and how navigation in VR with body-based can enhance subsequent knowledge of real world environments 2) how the brain codes spatial distance by employing simultaneous EEG recordings 3) how the brain codes the relative directions of landmarks in the environment by modeling the underlying multidimensional brain networks using high-resolution functional magnetic imaging (fMRI). The outcomes from these experiments will be important to testing models of spatial navigation and advancing our understanding of the extent to which we employ visual vs. body-based cues to represent spatial environments, currently an issue of significant debate in the field.