Welcome to the Developmental and Psychophysiology Laboratory

In his 23 years at OSU, Dr. David Thomas has explored a number of areas of research. Most of his effort has gone into investigations of early infant development, with a focus on the recording of the electrical activity of the brain to study memory and information storage. He and his graduate students have also completed projects on attention and response inhibition in children, novelty preference in infants, statistical aspects of the recording and averaging of human event-related potentials , attention-deficit disorder, and the neuropsychological assessment of hippocampal function in post-traumatic stress disorder.

Dr. Thomas' research is currently involved with nutrition, malnutrition, and neurotoxicants and their relation to cognitive development in infancy. Dr. Thomas and his collaborators in the Department of Nutritional Sciences and the Department of Human Development and Family Sciences at OSU, and at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center, have just begun a large study of zinc supplementation in Ethiopian mothers and their infants and how this micronutrient affects cognitive and emotional development. This team has also received funding from the United States Department of Agriculture for a study to be carried out in Oklahoma which investigates the relationships among iron, zinc, lead, and cadmium to cognitive development in infants.

Links at the top of the page will take you to more information on this research, students currently working in the lab, lab facilities, and publications.  Links are also available if you are interested in joining the lab or participating with your infant in research projects.