Natalie Brito, Assistant Professor, NYU

Dr. Natalie Brito is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Applied Psychology at New York University. Dr. Brito’s research explores how social and cultural contexts shape the trajectory of brain and behavioral development, with the goal of better understanding how to best support caregivers and create environments that foster healthy development. Specifically, her ongoing studies examine how both proximal factors (i.e., maternal mental health, parent-child interactions) and distal influences (i.e., social policies) impact the development of attention, memory, and socioemotional skills during the first three years of life. Dr. Brito’s work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Home Visiting Applied Research Collaborative (HARC). She has also received recognition for her research from multiple organizations including APA (Boyd McCandless Award), APS (Rising Star), and CIFAR (Azrieli Global Scholar). Dr. Brito is passionate about finding creative ways to share scientific knowledge about child development with the broader public, and has active collaborations with non-profit organizations, parenting groups, and app developers.

Research consistently demonstrates that the first two years of life are sensitive periods during which warm, predictable, and responsive caregiving are important to children’s social, emotional, and cognitive development. Caregivers impact the developing infant’s ability to flexibly adapt to the demands of the environment, and the caregiver’s own stress physiology is a critical factor influencing caregiving behavior and subsequent child development. This talk will examine how early experiences within the home environment may contribute to differences in infant neurocognitive outcomes, examining both proximal interactions and more distal social policies. Understanding the wider effects of the sociocultural context on development can potentially help to disentangle the many pathways through which adaptations to the environment impact brain and behavior.