University of Warsaw

Faculty Member, Faculty of Psychology

Other Affiliations: University of East London, School of Psychology

Adiunkt (Assistant Professor)

About

Currently I am working on the TALBY project, aimed at identifying early predictors (at 6-7 months of age) of language and social communication problems later in life. In TALBY project we employ portable eye-tracking devices in the community settings (Sure Start Children's Centres) using early social cognition, auditory and audio-visual integration tasks. In this large cohort study we are hoping to also better define early risk factors for language problems that are related to socio-economic factors. This project is funded by a grant from the Nuffield Foundation.

Since 2009 my work has been focussed on the early impact of diverse socio-economic backgrounds on early language, attention and social-cognitive development of infants in the first year of life. In particular, we have been studying cognitive development of infants coming from families with low SES on a variety of measures, including ERPs, eye-tracking and standardised behavioural assessment. The pilot ELAS project on low-SES infants and families from East London was funded by a grant from the Eranda Foundation and run at IRCD with Dr Elena Kushnerenko and Prof. Derek Moore, also in collaboration with Prof. Mark Johnson and Prof. Annette Karmiloff-Smith from Birkbeck. Visit IRCD Babylab site for more information.

My Ph.D. project was focused on the neural basis of face processing in the human brain, especially on the role of subcortical visual pathways during the early stages of such processing. It was aimed at studying how evolutionarily ancient retinotectal visual pathway (including superior colliculus, pulvinar and amygdala) is active in humans from birth through adulthood, allowing rapid detection of faces and facial emotion expressions. I have studied effects of faces and schematic faces on attention and eye movements, with covert and overt orienting tasks. I have also used EEG/ERPs (event-related potentials) and time-frequency analysis to study the influences of the subcortical face pathway on the early stages of cortical face processing.

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