User:InfancyResearch

Tricia Striano (born April 23, 1973) is a developmental psychologist at the Department of Psychology of Hunter College of the City University of New York (CUNY) and director of the Infancy Research Laboratory.

Career
After earning her Ph. D. from Emory University in 2000, Striano became head of the Independent Research Group on Cultural Ontogeny at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. In fall 2004, she received the Sofja Kovalevskaja Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. She used the award to start the Neurocognition and Development group at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences and Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Leipzig. From 2005 to 2007, Striano worked as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pediatrics and Kennedy Center for Human Development at Vanderbilt University. In fall 2007, Striano took a position as an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Hunter College.

Experiments
The research carried out at Infancy Research try to infer the social and cognitive abilities of infants and children using several methods. Examples of behavioral paradigms include preferential looking, measuring infants’ looking time to one of two objects or events, still face, a paradigm in which infants’ behavioral responses are measured when a researcher interacts playfully with the infant and then suddenly stops, and habituation studies, in which infants view a stimulus many times and are then shown a new stimulus; the infants’ looking time toward the new stimulus indicates whether or not they perceive differences between the two stimuli.

These methods also include EEG studies, which measure infants' electrical brain activity associated with seeing pictures or hearing sounds, as well as behavioral paradigms, noninvasive testing methods that have been designed to help better understand infant cognition.

Additionally, the lab conducts studies on children with autism. These studies use the same paradigms as those outlined above (i.e., behavioral paradigms, EEG studies). With these studies, the infancy research seeks to better understand atypical development and to diagnose children with autism earlier.