Thrive
Early
Early interventions Transforms:
Tracking Infant Eye Movment
Dr. Joseph Fagan pioneered the use of length of infant gaze to novel human faces in his development of the Fagan Test of Infant Intelligence in the early 1980s. Although this test showed early promise as a measure of working memory that was predictive of cognitive ability in early and middle childhood, it was difficult to implement in a reliable and valid manner in low resource settings.
In recent years, eye tracking technology and instrumentation has become very precise, powerful, affordable, and portable as a measurement tool. Because of this, eye tracking instruments have been extensively validated as a sensitvive measure of child attention, working memory, and learning in laboratory-based cognitive neuroscientific research related to language learning and literacy.
To this end, Michael Boivin is using current technology to apply Dr Fagan's work in a way that is much more conducive to low resource settings in Uganda
More information coming soon!
More information coming soon!
When Michael Boivin went to Zaire to study the
cognitive development of village children, he
found that "the doctor and the professor soon
became the patient and the learner." He worked with HIV-positive children, met one of the last great Bateke territorial chiefs. He tried to video a silverback gorilla while stamping out a column of stinging driver ants. In a series of humorous and honest lettersto his friends, collected here as The Accidental Anthropologist, he shares what he learned about their culture—and his own.