PINE SEED: Socioemotional Experience-Expectant Development

We are currently actively recruiting new participants for PINE SEED! If you are interested, please fill out our interest form here or click here for more information.

Project PINE SEED will focus on the earliest foundations of socioemotional development and the role of the environment in shaping this early learning across the first 2 years of life. Project SEED aims to answer several questions. How does the environment contribute to healthy neurodevelopment? What are the effects of different dimensions of early adverse experiences (e.g. threat, deprivation, predictability, quantity) on this early learning? Are some kinds of learning more sensitive to the environment than others, and if so, why and how? We will focus on multiple key components of socioemotional function that co-occur across infancy: language acquisition, learning to process faces, and forming caregiver attachments. To do so, we need precise, longitudinal measurements of the environment, brain plasticity, and socioemotional learning. We will characterize early environments through multi-modal approaches, including at-home video and audio recordings from the baby’s perspective. We have also developed paradigms and neuroimaging measures that let us capture and compare profiles of brain plasticity and learning across socioemotional domains.