MIND Lab

At the Minds Interacting ‘n Developing (MIND) Lab, we study the neuro-psychological processes contributing to adaptive caregiving and infants’ socioemotional development, focusing primarily on the transition to parenthood (pregnancy to postpartum) and the first year of the child’s life. Our mission is to gain a deeper understanding of parents and caregivers’ experiences and the processes going on in their minds to better help support caregivers’ mental health and wellbeing as people as well as caregivers, and children early emotional and social development. To this end, we study how neural, cognitive, and affective processes support adaptive caregiving behaviors, and relate to caregiver wellbeing and child development, by using interdisciplinary methods ranging from interviews and observations of parent-child interactions and infant behavior, to computerized cognitive tasks and neural reactivity to parenting-related stimuli.