Infant Learning and Development Lab
During their first year of life, human infants undergo dramatic transformations in the ability to control their own bodies. They begin life helpless, unable to even lift their own heads. And yet, after just one year, they are able to sit, reach for objects, crawl, walk, and even speak a few words. These new skills mark changes across all systems of the body, including cognitive, perceptual, and motor systems. Changes in these abilities completely reorganize infants' relationships with their physical and social worlds.
These advances in perceptual and motor skills mark cognitive advances as well. For example, as infants' visual acuity improves, they show marked preferences for different patterns and shapes. In addition, as infants learn to crawl, they are more likely to avoid visual cliffs and attend to spatial information. Thus, what infants know is firmly grounded in how they perceive the world and how they act in it. Cognition is continually linked to these bodily interactions, so that studying development involves understanding how perception and action interact with cognition to produce behavior.
My research focuses on two aspects of this larger perspective. First, I study the relationship between exploratory behavior and changes in locomotor experience.
My second area of research investigates what very young infants (3- to 7-month-olds) know about number, and how their visual attention affects their behavior in number tasks.
If you are interested in having your infant participate in a study, or would like to work in the lab, please contact me at 527-5599 or send me an e-mail: clearfmw @ whitman.edu.