Science
Seeing through the eyes of another...
I am interested in how different experiences in our lives color the lens through which we come to see the world. How do certain experiences shape the way we perceive the world around us? How does developing in a certain body with specific affordances shape what we notice about our environment? These are the questions that I often think about!
I'm also extremely interested in the life sciences in general, and you will often find me collecting samples while on hikes, breeding colonies in my personal terrariums, aquariums, and paludariums, and cultivating fungus and plant gardens!
Babies in Virtual Reality!
My doctoral dissertation focused on how one experience in particular - becoming a parent - can change how adults learn to perceive the world around them. To test this, I designed a videogame featuring a virtual infant moving around a dangerous environment. I then measured how parents and non-parents moved around and responded to their baby, the danger, and the environment at large. We found that caregivers make tradeoffs to keep their baby safe, and will even misperceive how fast cars appear so that they can move faster to protect their baby!
The Parental Brain and Stress
How do hormones and stress mediate the relationship between experience and perception? One way to start looking into this is to study stress in parents as they watch virtual infants engage in a dangerous activity. I created a machine that measures Galvanic Skin Conductance (GSC), or how much people sweat in response to stress, to see how arousal changes while keeping a virtual infant safe. We found that watching a baby in a dangerous environment is stressful to both parents and nonparents, and that this stress led is likely what causes perceptual distortions.
Robots and Dogs too?!
Do people also show perceptual distortions for robots and dogs too? It turns out, no! There's something special about babies. Adults reacted the quickest to danger when there was an infant, and secondly to a dog, but they didn't seem to care much about the robot at all. People also saw cars as moving much faster when a baby was around compared to either the dog or robot.
Relevant publications:
Murrugarra, E. & Goldstein, M. H. (under review). How caregivers perceive threats to keep infants safe.
Murrugarra, E. & Goldstein, M. H. (under review). The dynamics of perception in caregiving: How infants change the way we see the world.
Murrugarra, E. (2024). Through the Eyes of a Parent: How Caregiving Experiences Shape Our Perception of the Physical World (Doctoral dissertation, Cornell University).
Murrugarra, E. & Goldstein, M. H. (2024). How we perceive the world around babies: Arousal moderates information-processing of infantile cues. [Paper presentation]. IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning (ICDL) 2024, Austin, Texas.
Venditti, J. A., Murrugarra, E., McLean, C. R., & Goldstein, M. H. (2023). Curiosity constructs communicative competence through social feedback loops. Advances in Child Development and Behavior, 65, 99-134.
Some other presentations over my career:
Murrugarra, E. & Atchley, R. (2018, April). Embodiment in Sign Language: What ASL Can Teach Us about Emotion and Metaphor in Language. Oral talk presented at the Undergraduate Research Symposium at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS.
Murrugarra, E. (2018, April). Minding Evolution: The Role of Emergentism in Defining What It Means to Have a Mind. Paper presented at the Minorities in Philosophy Conference at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS.
Murrugarra, E. & Ramey, C. (2017, November). Character Imagery and Narrative Transportation. Oral talk presented at the Undergraduate Research Seminar in the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS.
Murrugarra, E. & Atchley, R. (2017, October). The Role of Menstrual Hormone Regulation: A Longitudinal Study Using Amazon Mechanical Turk. Poster presented at the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science Conference in Salt Lake City, UT.
Murrugarra, E. & Atchley, R. (2017, March). Looking at Differences in Female Mental Health: The Role of Menstrual Hormone Regulation. Poster session presented at the Great Plains Student Convention in Psychology Fort Hays at Fort Hays State University, Fort Hays, KS.