Kaya de Barbaro

Assistant Professor, Psychology, College of Liberal Arts, UT

Kaya de Barbaro, Ph.D. Is an assistant professor in the department of Psychology at UT. Kaya’s background is in cognitive science, an interdisciplinary field where she was trained in methods and theories from psychology, neuroscience, philosophy and computer science. Her expertise is In developmental science, and her work spans the domains of social, cognitive, motor, and physiological development. Across these domains, Kaya has characterized the micro-dynamics of infants’ activity — as they use their eyes and hands to play and explore while expressing patterns of arousal and Affect. To capture infants’ activity in high resolution, she has used tools ranging from fine-grained video analyses to eye tracking and physiological sensors. She has developed a unique methodological toolkit to make sense of and quantify theoretically-interesting patterns in these high-density datasets. Kaya’s current research is in the emerging field of computational behavioral science, bridging insights from developmental science, clinical psychology, computer science, and electrical engineering. Her lab uses mobile and wearable sensors to gain unprecedented access into the daily experiences of mothers and their infants. The goals of this work are to access the basic mechanisms of maternal mental health and infant social-emotional development, and ultimately to develop “just in time” interventions for cases of high risk, such as the transmission of risks for depression from mothers to infants.