During her postdoctoral training in the Before and After Baby Lab in the Child Study Center, Tal Yatziv worked on the mechanisms of adaptive caregiving, assessing parents' biases in processing infant affective facial expressions. She used a measure of cortical activity time-locked onto stimulus presentation - called event-related potentials - and computational modeling to examine how parents’ biases shape the way they detect, understand, and respond to their infant’s needs and internal state, as well as how these processes evolve from pregnancy to postpartum.
This Kavli project “has been invaluable in jump-starting [her] line of research on biases in processing infant-related information” and enabled her to extend her training in using electroencephalography (EEG) to study responsivity to infant affective expressions in pregnancy.
Dr. Yatziv is now a lecturer in the Department of Psychology at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel, where she directs the Minds Interacting N’ Developing (MIND) Lab.
This article is part of a special series highlighting the impact of the Kavli Institute for Neuroscience at Yale. The series will be published ahead of the Kavli 20th Anniversary Symposium, taking place on Friday, September 20th in TAC.