Promoting parent-infant responsiveness in families experiencing homelessness.

My Baby's First Teacher is an intervention designed specifically for parents with infants staying in emergency homeless shelters. Infants are overrepresented in shelter populations and face considerable risk to their development, including mental health. We utilized a randomized controlled design across three family shelters to evaluate the program's effectiveness with 24 dyads assigned to the intervention compared to 21 dyads in care-as-usual.

Modeling the Development of Audiovisual Cue Integration in Speech Perception.

Adult speech perception is generally enhanced when information is provided from multiple modalities. In contrast, infants do not appear to benefit from combining auditory and visual speech information early in development. This is true despite the fact that both modalities are important to speech comprehension even at early stages of language acquisition.

Impact of experience-dependent and -independent factors on gene expression in songbird brain.

Songbirds provide rich natural models for studying the relationships between brain anatomy, behavior, environmental signals, and gene expression. Under the Songbird Neurogenomics Initiative, investigators from 11 laboratories collected brain samples from six species of songbird under a range of experimental conditions, and 488 of these samples were analyzed systematically for gene expression by microarray. ANOVA was used to test 32 planned contrasts in the data, revealing the relative impact of different factors.

Deafening-induced vocal deterioration in adult songbirds is reversed by disrupting a basal ganglia-forebrain circuit.

Motor exploration can be an adaptive strategy when behavior fails to achieve an expected outcome. For example, like humans, adult songbirds change their vocal output when auditory feedback is altered or absent. Here, we show that the output of an anterior forebrain pathway (AFP) through the avian basal ganglia directly contributes to the expression of deafening-induced vocal changes in adulthood.

Increased Fos expression among midbrain dopaminergic cell groups during birdsong tutoring.

During avian vocal learning, birds memorize conspecific song patterns and then use auditory feedback to match their vocal output to this acquired template. Some models of song learning posit that during tutoring, conspecific visual, social and/or auditory cues activate neuromodulatory systems that encourage acquisition of the tutor's song and attach incentive value to that specific acoustic pattern. This hypothesis predicts that stimuli experienced during social tutoring activate cell populations capable of signaling reward.