PINE SEED: Sensory 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 sensory and language 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 and positive experiences 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 kinds of learning that co-occur across infancy within visual and language development. To do so, we need precise, longitudinal measurements of the environment, brain plasticity, and infant learning. We will characterize early environments through multi-modal approaches, including at-home photos and audio recordings from the baby’s perspective. We have also developed paradigms and neural measures that let us capture and compare profiles of brain plasticity and learning across visual and language domains.