Archives: News

Bill Campbell joined our lab in 2000, but we sadly said our good-byes due to his retirement at the end of 2013. Bill was our IT guy as well as everyone’s handyman. I don’t believe there was anything Bill could not fix or build and I’m sure everyone will miss Bill’s famous BBQ!! Needless to say he is already being missed by everyone. We do get to catch up with Bill when he occasionally stops by the lab to say hello and Bill still attends our “lab meetings” on the golf course. Thank you Bill for your hard work!

On August 15th, Michelle will leave the University of South Carolina and start her new position as Assistant Professor of Psychology at Limestone College in Gaffney, SC. Michelle enjoyed the time she spent in the Infant Development Laboratory and will miss everyone!

project title: Effects of Short Interstimulus Invervals (ISIs) on Infant Sustained Attention and Correlated Event-related Potentials (ERPs) – Description of the news: This study is my qualifying project that is mentored by Dr. John Richards. The main idea of this project is that short ISIs will facilitate infant sustained attention and cause better attention engagement in infant ERP studies. This summer Wanze made great progress on preparation for this project. The E-prime program has been finalized and works well. The NSR program and video recording program have been tested and ready for the study. EEGlab and ERPlab have been tested and will be used as the main ERPs analysis programs for this project. We tested an adult participant for this study and everything went well. Wanze has also made a video for this study and it has been uploaded to our website by Dr. Richards. We scheduled several infants in Aug and Sep as the prior subjects. We are almost ready for collecting data.

In a recent study the USC Infant Lab included Will Amick, a 2 year-old, which was a 2nd generation participant. His mother, Meredith, participated in a previous study as an infant. Needless to say, this was an exciting experience for the grandmother!

Bill: We moved into our new building in February, 2013. On the whole we are very happy in the new building. We continue to adjust building parameters. We have had a water leak in the EEG control room from the original contractors cutting a internal AC drain pipe and not capping it; after about two months they have determined this was the leak; capped the valve; had to remove part of the wall and probably replace carpet. This was finally done on August 1. Jessica Greene had a condensation pipe leak in the test room she uses; due to the placement of an inferior connection AND a plastic tube to carry the water; this was replaced in June. Mike had no A/C in his office, now his office is cold from the central A/C system.

Recently, Nicki was fortunate to be able to attend the Sackler Summer Institute at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York, New York. The Institute was organized by B. J. Casey, John’s former post-doc, and a number of former “Sacklerites” (i. e., Summer Institute attendees) returned this year to give a series of talks relating to developmental cognitive neuroscience. Dima Amso gave a talk discussing “Attention and Memory Across Development”, which was especially significant to Nicki in how it related to work with infants in our own lab. In addition to many educational talks given by the 13 speakers, the Institute allowed for lots of interaction and interesting discussions amongst researchers from diverse backgrounds. Nicki returned from NYC a little sleep-deprived but extremely motivated to learn more about many of the speakers’ developmental research and how their studies with (older) children might inform our research with

Nicki’s paper titled “Perceptual Specialization and Configural Face Processing in Infancy” has been accepted into the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology (Zieber, Kangas, Hock, Hayden, Collins, Bada, Joseph, & Bhatt, in press). This research explored face processing infancy by examining whether 5- and 9-month old infants could discriminate spacing changes between features in human male and monkey faces, as well as in houses made to resemble faces. Adults rely upon this type of spacing information when viewing faces, and utilization of this type of information has been linked to face expertise. The current study found that infants more readily process configural information (e. g., the distance between features such as eyes) in faces than in non-face stimuli, suggesting even early in life, faces are processed differently than other objects.

Michelle successfully defended her dissertation entitled: “The Impact of Age and Executive Function on Susceptibility to Misinformation.” Abstract: The current study examined the impact of age and executive function on susceptibility to misinformation. A total of 41 healthy young (19-31) and older (59-77) adults were presented with visual misinformation in a paradigm originally used by Okado and Stark (2005). Participants then completed a recognition memory task while undergoing a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scan. Participants also completed a series of cognitive measures used to assess executive function. Results showed that age and executive function were both significant predictors of recognition memory accuracy. Activity in brain regions associated with conflict processing was greater for accurate versus false memory retrieval in both older and young adults. In older adults, activity in the anterior cingulate cortex was positively correlated with accuracy. The results of the current work demonstrate that conflict resolution is a critical part of overcoming the effects of misinformation and individual difference variables predict susceptibility in young adults as well as older adults.

This summer John and Wanze are working together on the Chinese MRI templates project and they are about to finish their first paper. They have done all the analysis and they found very promising results. For example, they found the Chinese age-appropriate brain and head templates (created in this lab) fit the Chinese children significantly better than the existent templates widely used in the world (i.e. the US adult templates, the US children templates, and the Chinese adult template). These brain and head templates created in our lab will make great contribution to the literature and facilitate both research and medical applications.

Nicki recently attended the Maryland Neuroimaging Center’s Summer Institute at the University of Maryland, College Park. It was organized by Nathan Fox and Elizabeth Redcay and this year’s focus was Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience. Speakers came from a variety of research backgrounds and utilized an assortment of neuroimaging methods, such as structural and functional MRI and resting state connectivity. Nicki particularly enjoyed a talk by Marina Bedney, from Johns Hopkins University, titled “Insights into the Origins of Language from Studies with Blind Individuals.” In her talk, Dr. Bedney discussed the plasticity of human cortical areas in development, specifically how an area may assume a wide range of cognitive functions (from sensory-vision to abstract-language) depending upon developmental experience. The two day Institute was incredibly informative and a great opportunity to meet and discuss research with both leaders and peers in the field of developmental neuroscience.