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John has had two papers accepted for the Society for Psychophysiological Research conference in Firenze, Italy, October 2013. One paper is about his work on pro- and anti-saccade eye movements and their brain sources. The second is collaborative work with John Henderson, Joe Schmidt, and Steven Luke. This study examined ERP changes during reading of whole text. The abstracts can be found at Richards, 2013 and at Schmidt, Henderson, Luke, and Richards, 2013.

Joe Schmidt presented our work at the Vision Sciences Society annual meeting. Joe, Steven Luke, John Henderson, and John Richards have been doing collaborative work that integrates eye-tracking during reading and EEG/ERP analysis. We found that there were differences in the P1/N1 ERP components between reading text and “pseudo-text.” This suggests that there are early components of the ERP that reflect text processing during reading.

This April the Infant Lab participated in the biennial meeting of SRCD (the Society for Research in Child Development) in Seattle, WA. It was a great opportunity to discuss and share our research with others in the field as well as attend many interesting talks and posters. John, Nicki, Wanze, Bridgette, and Jane attended the conference and our lab made several presentations. John presented two posters, “Cortical Source Analysis of ERP in Infant Spatial Cueing” and “A Stereotaxic MRI Brain Atlas for Infants and Preschool Children” and was a discussant for a symposium titled “Getting More Out Of EEG: New Inroads to the Developing Brain.” This symposium presented studies from several labs that use EEG source analysis to identify areas of neural activation during cognitive tasks, and John was very excited to see that more labs are beginning to utilize these types of analyses. Nicki presented a poster titled “Developmental Changes in the Infant N290 in Response to Faces and Toys” and Bridgette presented the poster “Visual Preferences in Infants at High-Risk for Autism: Behavioral and Psychophysiological Cross-Group Comparisons.” Nicki (and Bridgette) were able to attend several presentations that examine differences in ASIBS (infant siblings of autistic children) that are emerging very early in infancy, which relates to future studies we have planned in our collaboration with Jane Roberts’ Lab. Wanze enjoyed many of the talks and found BJ Casey’s lecture on “The Adolescent Brain: From Human Imaging to Mouse Genetics” to be particularly inspiring. We all returned to the lab excited to get back to our research and hoping to incorporate some of the new things we learned into our studies.

SRCD is happening! John, Nicki Zieber, Michelle Phillips, and Bridgette Tonnsen all have posters that are being presented at the biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development. This conference has a wide variety of people interested in child development, and is the major conference for developmental psychologists. Nicki is presenting an analysis of infants responses to faces; John is presenting a cortical source analysis of spatial cueing; Michelle’s poster is about the infant atlas project (John will present), and Bridgette will present some preliminary analyses of the project with typical developing, siblings of ASD, and FXS children. Wanze also will be attending the conference.

Nicki presented at the Psychology Department’s Hard Data Cafe on April 5th. She gave a talk titled Infants’ Perception of Emotion from Body Movements which included the results of her dissertation research on this topic. In this research, she used an intermodal preference technique where infants viewed side by side videos of an angry and happy body movement while hearing either a happy or angry vocalization. She found that 6.5-month-old infants were able to match the emotions portrayed in the body movements to the vocalization emotion and that infants preferred to view the body movement that was congruent with the vocalization. Additionally, infants looked longer at the congruent body posture when viewing static images of happy and angry bodies while hearing either the happy or angry vocalization.

The “Data Blitz” was held at the Institute for Mind and Brain this week. John Richards presented an overview of his work studying the relation between infant brain activity and responses to mother and stranger faces.

Wanze: I presented a paper at the SENC conference, “The Construction of Brain Templates for Chinese Children and Adolescents from 8 to 16 Years of Age.” This is an ongoing project mentored by Dr. John Richards. Dr. Kang Lee at U of Toronto is our collaborator in this project. I presented the preliminary results of this project. We found that Chinese children and adolescents templates work significantly better than American age-related templates, MNI 152 template, and Chinese56 template. We also found that Chinese children’s head is wider and shorter in length compared to American children’s head

Nicki’s manuscript titled “Infants’ Perception of Emotion from Body Movements” was recently accepted by Child Development. This paper reports the finding from her dissertation studies that 6.5-month-old infants prefer to view emotional body movements congruent with a simultaneously presented emotional vocalization.

Prof. Steven Luck (UC Davis) conducted a mini-ERP Boot Camp at the University of South Carolina on February 25, 26, and 27. This was sponcored by the USC’s Institute for Mind and Brain (mindandbrain.sc.edu) and the Department of Psychology www.psych.sc.edu. Over 70 people attended the boot camp. The Boot Camp is based on his book, “An Introduction to the Event-Related Potential Technique” (MIT Press).Please see http://erpinfo.org/the-erp-bootcamp. The ERP Boot Camp is designed for beginning and intermediate ERP researchers who would like to obtain a firm grasp of the fundamentals of ERP research. The boot camp consisted of 2 days of lectures and discussion of ERP concepts and classic and contemporary ERP papers, and a 1 day computer-based ERPLab tutorial. A fun time was had by all!!!!

Kelsey Smith is a student in the Clinical-Community Psychology graduate program, and one of the “Behavioral-Biomedical Interface Program” students (BBIP). Kelsey started working in the lab and will help to do structural MRI recordings with preschool age children (2 to 4 years) and work on a project focusing on comparing the validity of using child versus adult MRI atlases for young children.