CAT Lab Researchers Granted Travel Awards to Present at SRCD

Congratulations to CAT Lab researchers Kelley Gunther, Leigha MacNeill and Alicia Vallorani who were awarded travel grants to attend the 2019 Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) conference in Baltimore, MD.

Kelley Gunther is a second-year student in developmental psychology interested in how visual attention may characterize risk or protective factors for anxiety disorders in behaviorally inhibited children. Her talk will describe how levels of naturalistic sustained attention, as measured through mobile eye-tracking, are a risk factor for internalizing symptoms in behaviorally inhibited children.

Leigha MacNeill is a sixth-year student in developmental psychology interested in how the family contributes to children’s developing emotion regulation and attentional control and whether these processes are dependent on child temperament. Her talk will discuss dynamic interaction patterns of parents and behaviorally inhibited children across a challenging, laboratory-based task, using indicators of children's sustained visual attention (captured via mobile eye-tracking) and parenting behaviors.

Alicia Vallorani is a third-year student in developmental psychology interested in how behavior, social attention and neural processing interact to inform the development of social engagement, particularly in the peer context. Her talk will examine how children of varying temperaments attend to social and non-social rewards, as measured by mobile eye-tracking, during a social interaction.