The Role that Caregivers Play in Infant Development

Join us for these fascinating talks from Dr Silvia Rigato and Dr Maria Laura Filippetti

Silvia Rigato on Infant processing of the mother’s face and longitudinal associations with emotional reactivity in the first year of life 

Past research has focused on infants processing of the mother’s face, however it is still unknown how visual and brain responses to this socially relevant stimulus change over time and what factors associate with such changes. A longitudinal study (N ~ 60) was conducted to investigate the trajectories of infant visual preference and brain responses (ERPs) to the mother’s face (vs a stranger’s face) and how these are related to the development of emotional reactivity in the first year of life. Results show that both infant visual preference and brain responses evoked by the mother’s face are related to infant falling reactivity, i.e. the ability to recover from distress, in the first year of life. In this talk, I will discuss these findings in light of the roles that both infant development and the caregiver play in emerging emotion regulation capacities during the first year of life.

The Speakers

Dr Silvia Rigato works as a Senior lecturer in the Department of Psychology at the University of Essex, where she set up the Essex Babylab for studying child development, and co-founded the multidisciplinary group ‘From the womb to the world’ to bridge the gap between lab-based research and the community of parents and professionals. Her research in developmental cognitive neuroscience focuses on how the infant’s brain responds to social and perceptual stimuli, how these responses change over time and how they are influenced by prenatal environment and postnatal experiences.

Dr Maria Laura Filippetti is a developmental cognitive neuroscientist investigating the development of body representations. Her research combines behavioural and psychophysiological methods to study the role of multisensory integration in how infants learn about their bodies. Dr Filippetti is currently a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in the Department of Psychology of the University of Essex, where she is also part of the Essex Babylab.