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Drew Abney

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Associate Professor, Graduate Coordinator
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 2024-25 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.

Articles Featuring Drew Abney

There’s a common thread between parenting, teaching, statistics, and engineering for Drew Abney.

Growing up in the Chicago suburbs, he always dreamed of being a high school teacher— specifically, a wood shop and engineering design teacher. His mother,…

Dr. Abney is an Assistant Professor in the Behavioral and Brain Sciences Program and serves as Graduate Coordinator for the Department of Psychology.

Undergraduate researchers in Dr. Drew Abney’s Developmental Dynamics lab pilot a new study using the lab’s new fNIRS hyper-scanning system. The system will be used to collect moment-to-moment neural dynamics of two individuals (two adults, an infant and their…

Graduate Students in My Lab

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