Tricia Striano

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 where she established the Infancy Research Laboratory.

Experiments

The research carried out at Infancy Research tries 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 (behavioral paradigms and EEG studies). With these studies, the Infancy Research Laboratory seeks to better understand atypical development and to diagnose children with autism earlier.

Publications

*Stefanie Hoehl, Lisa Wiese, & Tricia Striano, "Young Infants' Neural Processing of Objects Is Affected by Eye Gaze Direction and Emotional Expression" "PLOS One" 3(6): e2389. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0002389 [http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0002389 journal link]
*Tricia Striano, editor, "Social Cognition: Development, Neuroscience and Autism" ISBN: 9781405162173 Blackwell, 2008 . [http://www.blackwellpublishing.com/book.asp?ref=9781405162173&site=1 publishers link]
*Vincent Reid & Tricia Striano, editors "Social Cognition During Infancy: A Special Issue of the European Journal of Developmental Psychology" http://www.developmentalpsychologyarena.com/books/Social-Cognition-During-Infancy-isbn9781841698328]

External links

*The Infancy Research laboratory: [http://www.infancyresearch.com]