Stephanie Aguirre
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Arturo Arellano
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Research Project Title:
The Early Language Bias in Infants: Does it Exist for Visual Sign Language?
Description:
Presented a talk at the UCSD Undergraduate Research Conference in April of 2014, titled “The Early Language Bias in Infants: Does it Exist for Visual Sign Language?” He presented data showing that hearing, non-signing babies have shown greater looking preferences for signs than gestures. This early “language” bias goes away at 12 months, presumably because by that time, the babies aren’t exposed to sign language. The implication is that all babies have a natural inclination or ability to learn any language, whether that be a spoken or a signed language.
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Cristina Farkas
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Description:
Is TV exposure bad for young babies? Can babies improve their vision with video exposure? Another new exciting line of work that will be submitted for publication in the next few months is a study on perceptual learning in infants (Blumenthal & Bosworth, in prep). There is currently much controversy over what infants are capable of learning from baby “enrichment” videos, despite a proliferating phenomenon of baby television shows and computer DVD’s marketed to entertain and educate infants. With our postdoc fellow, Emily Blumenthal, and honors student Christina Farkas, we attempted to determine whether 3-month-old infants show evidence of perceptual learning in contrast detection of luminance and color gratings after a 20-minute video exposure. The experiment took place over 3 days: pre-video testing on Monday, video exposure on Wednesday, and post-video testing on Friday. Psychophysical data was collected with a forced-choice preferential looking paradigm for two stimulus types, each designed to selectively stimulate one of two main pathways from the eye to the LGN to the brain: magnocellular (which mediates dark-light, luminance sensitivity) and parvocellular (which mediates red-green, chromatic sensitivity) pathways. Infants were randomly assigned to 1 of 3 training video groups: luminance training, chromatic training, and no training. Results showed that short term video exposure within a week period did show small training improvements for chromatic, but not luminance sensitivity.
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Christy Merrill
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Jiajun Yuan
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When they graduated:
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Research Project Title:
Does Stroop Effect Exist for ASL?
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