Seth D. Pollak
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COVID-19-induced educational disruptions and children’s executive functioning: A longitudinal cohort study. Open
Literature suggests that the COVID-19 pandemic may have disrupted children's executive functioning (EF) development, but most studies rely on caregiver reports, cross-sectional data, or comparisons across cohorts. We build on the existing …
Conceptual knowledge increasingly supports emotion understanding as perceptual contribution declines with age Open
Human's abilities to reason about what others may be feeling undergo prolonged development throughout childhood and adolescence, yet the mechanisms driving the emergence of these skills remain elusive. This set of studies, conducted within…
View article: What Developmental Science Has to Say About Caregiving
What Developmental Science Has to Say About Caregiving Open
There are numerous popular books, magazines, blogs, and websites that provide advice or anecdotes about how best to care for children. These sources of information can drown out conclusions based on scientific consensus, negatively influen…
Continuing the momentum of developmental psychopathology: Lessons learned from the seminal contributions of Dante Cicchetti Open
The field of developmental psychopathology has grown broadly. Here, I draw upon lessons learned from Dante Cicchetti to highlight areas that show promise for continued disciplinary advancement. These include attention to equifinality and m…
Computational modeling approaches to emotional development. Open
Computational models of development have the potential to address a key challenge in emotional development research: investigating not only what changes across development but also how these changes come about. Drawing on connectionist and…
View article: Altered topological structure of the brain white matter in maltreated children through topological data analysis
Altered topological structure of the brain white matter in maltreated children through topological data analysis Open
Childhood maltreatment may adversely affect brain development and consequently influence behavioral, emotional, and psychological patterns during adulthood. In this study, we propose an analytical pipeline for modeling the altered topologi…
Childhood unpredictability and the development of exploration Open
Early in development, the process of exploration helps children gather new information that fosters learning about the world. Yet, it is unclear how childhood experiences may influence the way humans approach new learning. What influences …
Discussion of “LESA: Longitudinal Elastic Shape Analysis of Brain Subcortical Structures” Open
"Discussion of “LESA: Longitudinal Elastic Shape Analysis of Brain Subcortical Structures”." Journal of the American Statistical Association, 118(541), pp. 20–21
Perceptual learning is robust to manipulations of valence and arousal in childhood and adulthood Open
Despite clear links between affective processes in many areas of cognition and perception, the influence of affective valence and arousal on low-level perceptual learning have remained largely unexplored. Such influences could have the pot…
Acquiring Complex Communicative Systems: Statistical Learning of Language and Emotion Open
During the early postnatal years, most infants rapidly learn to understand two naturally evolved communication systems: language and emotion. While these two domains include different types of content knowledge, it is possible that similar…
Acquiring complex communicative systems: Statistical learning of language and emotion Open
During the early postnatal years, most infants rapidly learn to understand two naturally- evolved communication systems: language and emotion. While these two domains include different types of content knowledge, it is possible that simila…
Statistical Analysis on Brain Surfaces Open
In this paper, we review widely used statistical analysis frameworks for data defined along cortical and subcortical surfaces that have been developed in last two decades. The cerebral cortex has the topology of a 2D highly convoluted shee…
Approach motivation and loneliness: Individual differences and parasympathetic activity Open
Loneliness, or perceived social isolation, is linked to a number of negative long‐term effects on both mental and physical health. However, how an individual responds to feeling lonely may influence their risk for later negative health out…
The role of maternal trauma and discipline types in emotional processing among Syrian refugee children Open
Stressful experiences in armed conflict incur intergenerational effects through parental behaviors with their children. A recent study reported that among Syrian refugee families, mothers’ (but not fathers’) post-traumatic stress (PTS) imp…
Low household income and neurodevelopment from infancy through adolescence Open
Despite advancements in the study of brain maturation at different developmental epochs, no work has linked the significant neural changes occurring just after birth to the subtler refinements in the brain occurring in childhood and adoles…
Early life stress and perceived social isolation influence how children use value information to guide behavior Open
Learning the value of environmental signals and using that information to guide behavior is critical for survival. Stress in childhood may influence these processes, but how it does so is still unclear. This study examined how stressful ev…
Testimony bias lingers across development under uncertainty. Open
Children have a powerful ability to track probabilistic information, but there are also situations in which young learners simply follow what another person says or does at the cost of obtaining rewards. This latter phenomenon, sometimes t…
The representation of emotion knowledge across development Open
The present study examined how children spontaneously represent facial cues associated with emotion. 106 three- to six-year-old children (48 male, 58 female; 9.4% Asian, 84.0% White, 6.6% more than one race) and 40 adults (10 male, 30 fema…
Perceptual learning with mood manipulations -- Children and adults Open
A .csv including trial-by-trial data from a texture detection visual perceptual learning experiment (see, e.g., Ahissar & Hochstein, 2001). Each trial [row] includes whether the participant responded correctly ('acc'), the stimulus onset a…
Perceptual learning with mood manipulations -- Children and adults Open
A .csv including trial-by-trial data from a texture detection visual perceptual learning experiment (see, e.g., Ahissar & Hochstein, 2001). Each trial [row] includes whether the participant responded correctly ('acc'), the stimulus onset a…
Children track probabilistic distributions of facial cues across individuals. Open
Children face a difficult task in learning how to reason about other people's emotions. How intensely facial configurations are displayed can vary not only according to what and how much emotion people are experiencing, but also across ind…
Accumbofrontal tract integrity is related to early life adversity and feedback learning Open
Abuse, neglect, exposure to violence, and other forms of early life adversity (ELA) are incredibly common and significantly impact physical and mental development. While important progress has been made in understanding the impacts of ELA …
Thinking Clearly About Biology and Childhood Adversity: Next Steps for Continued Progress Open
In a previous Perspectives article, we described conceptual problems that pose challenges for research on the effects of childhood adversity and offered promising directions for future research on this topic. In a commentary on that articl…