Olivia Allison

LIFE Fellow since 2025, University of Virginia

UVA Fellow Speaker

I am a fourth year Developmental Psychology graduate student at the University of Virginia working with Tobias Grossmann. I completed my undergraduate education at Temple University in Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience. My graduate research broadly focuses on early developing social cognition. In particular, I am interested in understanding and delineating the neurobiological factors that support the emergence and development of social motivation and reward in humans, while focusing on factors that give rise to inter-and intra- variability in social development. I use various physiological and neuroimaging methods (fNIRS, EEG, eye-tracking) to investigate neurobiological mechanisms of early social motivation and reward in young human infants, and excited about opportunities granted by the LIFE Program to learn more about methods for modeling inter-and intra- variability in social developmental processes as they unfold across the first two years of life.

Publications

Allison, O., Kelsey, C., & Grossmann, T. (2025). Social smiling and laughter are linked to enhanced functional brain connectivity in young infants’ default mode network. Developmental Psychobiology, 67(5), Article e70088. https://doi.org/10.1002/dev.70088