Tal Yatziv, PhD

Tal Yatziv, Ph.D., is a Postdoctoral Associate at the Yale Child Study Center, working under the mentorship of Dr. Helena Rutherford. She received her Ph.D. in Psychology from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel in 2019. Her research interests focus on the interplay between cognitive and affective processes in shaping early parenting and infant socioemotional development. Specifically, Dr. Yatziv studies the contributions of cognitive control and automatic processing to how parents understand their children's thoughts and feelings, focusing on parental processing of infant cues, parental mentalization, and parental sensitive-responsiveness. In her research, she combines reaction-time and accuracy-based cognitive performance measures and computational modeling (e.g., evidence accumulation modeling), together with observation-based ecological methods (e.g., videotaped parent-infant interactions), to gain insights into how adaptive parenting unfolds in time.