Current Projects 

Planned Research Topics for the 2024-2025 School Year

• Thesis projects on inhibitory control and intelligence (Bailee Smith, 2nd year grad student) and stress on visual processing (Chase Artopoeus, 2nd year grad student)

• In partnership with Chattanooga 2.0,  we are working on a project that assess the influence of prenatal language intervention on early childhood language development. 

Tools We Will Be Using

• EyeLink 1000+ Eyetracking System

• Excel

• MatLab

• Gorilla Experiment Builder

• Qualtrics

Being a computer programmer is NOT a requirement to join the lab. Find out more on the "Join Us" page!

Multisensory Data Network: Collaborative Project

In collaboration with Dr. Lorraine Bahrick at Florida International University, the VMAD lab is working with 12 other Developmental Scientists from around the world to better understand typical and atypical development of attention. See an excerpt from the project below:

"Disorders of attention, social, and communicative functioning have become a significant public health concern, yet we lack a systematic data base characterizing the typical development of basic building blocks that support optimal outcomes. Without measures to assess individual differences in these fundamental skills, the pathways by which they affect later language, social, and cognitive development remain poorly understood. This present project will assess individual differences in attention maintenance, disengagement, and speed, and accuracy of intersensory processing for audiovisual social and nonsocial events in preverbal children across 3 to 60 months.

The Multisensory Data Network brings together a group of experts in developmental science across 13 research labs to collectively build a well-planned, large-scale, shared database, and mine the database to advance knowledge and theory in developmental science, and, at the same time, forge a new model for collaborative research." 

To learn more about the project, click here: ​https://sites.google.com/view/fiumultinetpublic 

The Role of Socioeconomic Status (SES) in Predicting Langauge, Social, and Cognitive Outcomes

In 2020, Dr. Eschman was awarded a research grant from the National Institute on Minority Health and Health Disparities  in collaboration with the Research Center on Minority Institutions (RCMI)  at Florida International University to study significant health disparities in infants and children. See an excerpt from the project description below: 

"Health disparities (including poor language, social, and cognitive outcomes) that disproportionately affect children from minority groups, including those from lower socioeconomic status (SES) households, have long received significant national attention. However, which early developing skills serve as foundations for these language, social and cognitive outcomes, when these disparities emerge across early development, and how they can be most efficiently measured, has remained understudied.

Basic attention skills established in infancy, including maintaining and disengaging attention, as well as attending to unified multisensory information (e.g. speaking faces and voices), are foundational for subsequent cognitive, social, and language developmental outcomes.

The current project, thus, seeks to identify infant attention and perceptual abilities (that become the foundation for later developmental outcomes) in children that differ as a function of SES classification. In addition to revealing a new method for identifying children at-risk for language, social, and cognitive delays, these data will provide a wealth of new information about developmental processes, and how minority individuals are uniquely affected."

For more information about the RCMI and more health disperaties research, click here:                                                  https://rcmi.fiu.edu/pilot-program/funded-scholars/ 

Examining the Impact of Item Desirability on Personality Test Responding: Insights from an Eyetracking Approach

This project aims to use eyetracking technology to understand the response process when participants are presented with personality items of varying item desirability, here defined as the tendency of individuals to respond to questions in a manner perceived as socially acceptable or desirable. We hypothesize that different levels of social desirability associated with these items will facilitate distinct response patterns and/or visual foraging strategies, which could be detected via eyetracking devices. The findings from this study will provide important insights into understanding the response process. Practically, it could be useful in explaining and detecting potential faking behaviors.