MTS is the department’s Mind, Technology, and Society speaker series. It is hosted by a different faculty member each semester. Founded by a generous gift from Professors Robert Glushko and Pamela Samuelson, MTS brings researchers and industry professionals from across the globe to present a variety of interdisciplinary work in cognitive science. See our UCMerced CogSci youtube channel for videos of past MTS talks!
CIS graduate students, faculty, and staff, and all who are interested are invited! Members of other departments at UC Merced as well as the general public are encouraged to attend. (Note: current CIS Ph.D. students are required to attend MTS each semester in residence, to fulfill their COGS 250 course requirement).
Dr. Abney's talk "It’s All About Time: How to Study Developmental Phenomena Across Multiple Levels of Analysis and Interactive Contexts" will be 3-4:30pm in COB 116.
Abstract: In this talk, I will present research that focuses on many developmental phenomena like learning, emotion regulation, sensorimotor development, and even sleep. In doing do, I will show how we can study developmental trajectories of human behavior and intelligence by focusing on the empirical cycles of going to and from controlled laboratory settings and everyday environments. The common thread throughout the presented studies is how the temporal dynamics of multimodal behaviors can be measured and analyzed across interactive contexts using diverse computational tools.
Bio: My research focuses on how behaviors and social interactions impact developmental trajectories throughout infancy and into toddlerhood. Studies conducted in my lab use various techniques: from conducting controlled laboratory experiments to free-flowing toy play sessions to collecting daylong multimodal (e.g., vocalizations, body movements, etc.) behavioral data. I’m motivated to apply existing techniques from applied computational social science and dynamical systems theory and also develop new computational and analytic methods to understand the dynamics of development during infancy and early childhood.
For more information or to sign up for email announcements, please contact the talk series organizer: cis-mts-lead@lists.ucmerced.edu.
