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Join Psi Chi at UGA!

Are you a psychology major or interested in a career in psychology? Join UGA’s chapter of Psi Chi: the International Honor Society in Psychology! Anyone is welcome to attend our monthly meetings regardless of your official membership status, year in school, or major. If you would like to get to know professors in the psychology department, learn about attending grad school, gain valuable career advice, or be notified of research opportunities, then Psi Chi is the place for you!

$10M NIH grant to Center for Family Research, including Drs. Gene Brody, Steven Beach, Brett Clementz, Katie Ehrlich, and Larry Sweet

Center for Family Research receives $10M NIH grant to continue their studies of health risks of poverty and racial discrimination. Investigators include Drs. Gene Brody, Steven Beach, Brett Clementz, Katie Ehrlich, and Larry Sweet. Congratulations!

Read more here.

Drew Abney

Graduate Coordinator
Assistant Professor, Behavioral and Brain Sciences Program

My research focuses on how behaviors and social interactions impact developmental trajectories throughout infancy and into toddlerhood. Studies conducted in my lab use various techniques: from conducting controlled laboratory experiments to free-flowing toy play sessions to collecting daylong multimodal (e.g., vocalizations, body movements, etc.) behavioral data. I’m motivated to apply existing techniques from applied computational social science and dynamical systems theory and also develop new computational and analytic methods to understand the dynamics of development during infancy and early childhood.

*I am not recruiting graduate students during the 2023-24 application cycle*

Education:

Postdoctoral Scholar in Developmental Psychology at Indiana University (2016-2019)

Ph.D. in Cognitive and Information Sciences at the University of California, Merced (2016)

 

Research Interests:

sensorimotor development; human interaction; emotion regulation; perception/action; language development

Selected Publications:

Full list on my Google Scholar Profile

Abney, D.H., Paxton, A., Dale, R., & Kello, C.T. (2021). Cooperation in sound and motion: Complexity matching in collaborative interaction. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General

Abney, D.H., Suanda, S.H., Smith, L.B., Yu, C. (2020). What are the building blocks of parent-infant coordinated attention in free-flowing interaction? Infancy.

Abney, D.H., Dale, R., Louwerse, M.M., & Kello, C.T. (2018). The Bursts and Lulls of Multimodal Interaction: Temporal Distributions of Behavior Reveal Differences Between Verbal and Non‐Verbal Communication. Cognitive Science42(4), 1297-1316.

Borjon, J.I., Abney, D.H., Smith, L.B., & Yu, C. (2018). Developmentally changing attractor dynamics of manual actions with objects in late infancy. Complexity.

Abney, D.H., Warlaumont, A. S., Oller, D.K., Wallot, S., & Kello, C.T. (2017). Multiple coordination patterns in infant and adult vocalizations. Infancy22(4), 514-539.

Abney, D.H., Paxton, A., Dale, R., & Kello, C.T. (2014). Complexity matching in dyadic conversation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General143(6), 2304.

Abney, D.H., Warlaumont, A.S., Haussman, A., Ross, J.M., & Wallot, S. (2014). Using nonlinear methods to quantify changes in infant limb movements and vocalizations. Frontiers in Psychology5, 771.

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