Neuroscience lunch --NIH gran t brewing (NRSA). 12:30pm, Academic Commons

Cognitive lunch -- Dr. Michael Anderson. 12:30pm, Zoom and CDW 2677

Quantitative lunch -- Jennifer Huck (UVa Library). 12:30pm, Mill 123 and Zoom

In this session, participants will learn fundamental approaches to creating a research compendium. This is the foundation of transparent and reproducible research. Participants will learn what kinds of documents and materials they should create and preserve; the information the documents should contain; and how they should be formatted and organized. Topics include raw data, analysis data, scripts, metadata, readme files, project organization, and naming conventions. Examples will be provided in R, but this information can be applied to any quantitative programming environment.

Clinical lunch -- Dr. Jessie Gibson (UVA Nursing) 12:00-1:00pm, Zoom, Millmont Cottage Conference Room

2021-22 Department of Psychology Colloquium Series -- Nick Turk-Browne, Yale University 1:30pm, Gilmer 390 and Zoom

Cognitive neuroscience provides a rich account of how different brain systems give rise to diverse forms of learning and memory. However, these theories are largely based on adult data and neglect the greatest period of learning in life, during early development. A key challenge for studying this age range is the limited set of behavioral measures available in infants. Neuroscientific techniques such as EEG and fNIRS provide a window into the infant mind, but have coarse spatial resolution and lack access to deep-brain structures important for adult learning and memory. I will present our recent efforts to adapt fMRI, a technique able to address these limitations, for studying human infants during cognitive tasks. I will focus on one line of studies in detail, concerning a mystery about how the brain supports statistical learning. We have shown in adults that the hippocampus is important for statistical learning, and statistical learning is a core building block of the infant mind, yet the infant hippocampus is assumed to be immature (e.g., to explain infantile amnesia). This and our other fMRI studies in awake infants aim to advance understanding of the functions and plasticity of the youngest minds and brains.

Social lunch -- Dr. Melissa Thomas-Hunt (UVa Darden). Zoom. 12:30pm, Zoom, CDW 2539

Community lunch -- Predissertation Showcase. Zoom. 12:30pm, Zoom and 138 Millmont

Developmental lunch -- Dr. Avi Sagi-Schwartz (University of Haifa). Zoom. 12:30pm, Corner Building, 1400 University Avenue and Zoom

2021-22 Department of Psychology Colloquium Series - Aerielle Allen (New York University). Zoom. 11:00am, Zoom

Racism is engrained in the fabric of American systems, structures, and practices, and as such, has direct implications for the quality of life among racial/ethnic minorities in the U.S., – namely, their health and socio-political well-being. However, racial/ethnic groups continue to differ in their beliefs about the prevalence of racism in the U.S., specifically, anti-Black racism. In this presentation I will discuss how we can understand individuals’ divergent perceptions around the existence of anti-Black racism and the downstream consequences of acknowledging anti-Black racism for individuals’ health and social change behaviors.

2021-22 Department of Psychology Colloquium Series - Channing Mathews (North Carolina State Univeristy). Zoom. 11:00am, Zoom

Ethnic-racial identity and critical consciousness have been associated with numerous positive outcomes in youth of color in academic, psychosocial, and sociopolitical domains. However, these two processes have been largely studied as unique, parallel processes rather than integrated in the lives of Black and Latinx youth. In today's talk Dr. Mathews will discuss how ethnic-racial Identity and critical consciousness serve as cultural assets in the lives of Black and Latinx youth. Using her integrated model of ERI and CC development (Mathews et al., 2020), she will highlight evidence that these two processes function together, rather than separately in Black and Latinx youth, particularly in association with STEM engagement. She will then discuss the next steps of her work which focus on mapping developmental trajectories of ERI and CC and psychometric analysis of ERI and CC measures. Broadly these findings reveal how an integrated framework of ethnic-racial identity and critical consciousness enhances a strengths based approach to the study of Black and Latinx populations. Further, the findings underscore the importance of these developmental processes to promote STEM engagement to address ethnic-racial disparities in the STEM career pipeline.

2021-22 Department of Psychology Colloquium Series - Kristia Wantchekon (Harvard University). Zoom. 11:00am, Zoom

Ethnic-racial identity (i.e., ERI; the ways in which individuals develop and ascribe meaning to their ethnic-racial identification; Umaña-Taylor et al., 2014) has emerged as a key developmental competency that promotes the psychosocial adjustment of ethno-racially diverse adolescents, including Black youth, and helps to attenuate the impact of risks like ethnic-racial discrimination on adjustment (Neblett et al., 2012). However, as we seek to better understand how ERI promotes and is protective of adolescent adjustment, several important questions remain underexplored. For example, we need to expand our understanding of how constellations of dimensions of ERI coexist and inform adjustment, rather than solely examining the dimensions of ERI and their relations to adjustment in isolation. Additionally, although schools are a central developmental context in adolescence (Eccles & Roeser, 2011), very little of the extant ERI research examines the implications of youth engaging in ERI development in the classroom for their broader identity developmental processes as well as their academic and psychological adjustment. This talk presents research that addresses these gaps and proposes important paths forward for future study.

2021-22 Department of Psychology Colloquium Series - Naila Smith (The Pennsylvania State University). Zoom. 11:00am, Zoom

In the United States, opportunities and constraints are organized hierarchically such that Black youth, especially those at the intersection of multiple systems of oppression (e.g., immigrants, girls), grow up on the margins of society. In this talk, Dr. Naila Smith will present an overview of her program of research that applies strengths-based, anti-racist approaches to center the role of the home and school context and social identity in the development of marginalized youth, particularly Black youth. First, she will share exemplars of her past work on racial discrimination as a contextual risk factor that shapes heterogeneity in African American parent-child relationships, an important ecology for youth development (Smith et al., Accepted). She will then share work on the role of ethnic identity and academic self-beliefs in shaping academic achievement among Caribbean immigrant youth (Smith et al., 2020). Following this, Dr. Smith will discuss her current externally funded project that uses an intersectional lens to examine how individual (teacher characteristics), relational (e.g., family-school collaboration), and school contextual factors may explain teacher-parent reporting discrepancies of Black girls’ socioemotional learning in kindergarten. Finally, her talk will conclude with an outline of future research plans to increase understanding of the development of marginalized youth in context to advance justice and equity for Black communities.