Paula A. Fitzpatrick, Ph.D

Adjunct Faculty


Degrees Earned

B.A., University of Connecticut, 1989
Ph.D., University of Connecticut, 1993
Ph.D. Thesis Title: “Development of Bimanual Coordination in a Rhythmic Clapping Task”

Undergraduate Courses Taught

Honors Life Stories
Honors Seminar
Psychology of Art
Perception
Psychology Research Seminar
General Psychology
Honors General Psychology
Positive Psychology

Special Interests

Dr. Fitzpatrick’s research interest is in the development of fine motor skill, the relationship between motor coordination and social skills, and the contribution of social coordination to social deficits in atypical populations. Her current research investigates patterns of social coordination in young children and adolescents with autism spectrum disorder and the development of movement control strategies in learning to use tools (such as spoons and hammers).  Dr. Fitzpatrick is an experimental psychologist.

Recent Publications & Editorships

Fitzpatrick, P., Bui, P.*, & Garry, A.* (in press). The role of perception-action systems in the development of tool using skill. Ecological Psychology.

Fitzpatrick, P. (2018). The future of autism research: Dynamic and process-oriented approaches. Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 57 (1), 16-17.

Fitzpatrick, P., Romero, V., Amaral, J., Duncan, A., Bishop, S., Barnard, H., Richardson, M. J., & Schmidt, R. C. (2017). Evaluating the importance of social motor synchronization and motor skill for understanding autism. Autism Research, 10, 16887-1699.

Fitzpatrick, P., Romero, V., Amaral, J., Duncan, A., Bishop, S., Barnard, H., Richardson, M. J., & Schmidt, R. C. (2017). Social motor synchronization: Insights for understanding social behavior in autism. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 47, 2092-2107.

Fitzpatrick, P., Frazier, J., Mitchell, T., Cochran, D., Coleman, C., & Schmidt R. C. (2016). Impairments of social motor synchrony evident in autism spectrum disorder. Frontiers in Psychology, 7: 1323. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2016.01323

Romero, V., Amaral, J., Fitzpatrick, P., Schmidt, R. C., Duncan, A. & Richardson, M. J. (2016). Establishing the validity of low-cost motion tracking systems when researching social motor coordination in children. Behavior Research Methods. doi:10.3758/s13428-016-0733-1

Romero, V., Fitzpatrick, P., Schmidt, R. C., & Richardson, M. J. (2016). Using cross-recurrence quantification analysis to understand social motor coordination in children with autism spectrum disorder. In C. L. Webber Jr., C. Iona, & N. Marwan (Eds.), Recurrence plots and their quantifications: Expanding horizons (pp. 227-240). Switzerland: Springer International Publishing.

Schmidt, R. C., & Fitzpatrick, P. (2016). What’s come before: The origin of the ideas of interactional synchrony and interpersonal synergies. In P. Passos, K. Davids, & J. Y. Chow (Eds.), The interpersonal coordination and performance in social systems. London: Routledge.

Romero, V., Amaral, J., Fitzpatrick, P., Schmidt, R. C., & Richardson, M. J. (2015). Capturing social motor coordination: A comparison of the Microsoft Kinect, video-motion analysis and the Polhemus Latus motion tracking system. In D. C. Noelle, R., Dale, A. S. Warlaumont, J. Yoshimi, T. Matlock, C. D. Jennings, & P. P. Maglio (Eds.), Proceedings of the 37th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society. Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

Fitzpatrick, P., Schmidt, K.*, Romero, V., Amaral, J., Richardson, M. J., & Schmidt, R. C. (2015). Perceiving movement synchronization differences in autism. In J. Weast-Knapp, M. Malone, & D. Abney (Eds.), Studies in perception and action XIII: Eighteenth international conference on perception and action, New York, NY: Psychology Press, Taylor & Francis Group.

Fitzpatrick,P., Mitchell, T., Frazier, J., Cochran, D, Coleman, C.*, & Schmidt, R. C. (2015). Exploring the behavioral and neural processes underlying social synchronization of individuals with and without social deficits. In J. Weast-Knapp, M. Malone, & D. Abney (Eds.), Studies in perception and action XIII: Eighteenth international conference on perception and action, New York, NY: Psychology Press, Taylor & Francis Group.

Schmidt, R. C., & Fitzpatrick, P.A. (2014). Understanding the motor dynamics of interpersonal interactions. IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, 774-778.