Dare Ann Baldwin - US grants

9458339 Baldwin This award provides support to Dr. Dare Baldwin under the National Science Foundation's Young Investigator Awards program. The objective of this program is to recognize outstanding young faculty in science and engineering, to enhance the academic career of recent PhD recipients by providing flexible support for research and educational activities, and to foster contact and cooperation between academia, industry, and institutions that support research and education. Dr. Baldwin has already made significant research contributions to the field of cognitive psychology, and she has the potential to become a leader in academic research and education. This award will allow the investigator to build on her existing research on the interpretive and information-gathering abilities children possess that support the rapid expansion of world knowledge. During the next few years she will study the language learning and information-gathering abilities of infants and young children. Through analysis of what enables children to resolve the inductive difficulties intrinsic to word learning and language comprehension, she will try to ascertain if the mechanisms of interpersonal inference that we have found to figure so importantly in language acquisition likewise expedite knowledge acquisition in other domains. Through analysis of children's abilities to seek new information through direct investigation, she hopes to determine if it may be possible to point to the involvement of a relatively open and versatile inductive capacity which promotes knowledge acquisition from a very early age. From analysis of children's abilities to elicit new information through indirect, social channels, her goal is to discover whether the human ability to appreciate others as repositories of information plays a critical role in the efficient transmission of knowledge between individuals. The findings from this research program have the potential to provide major new insight s into complex interrelations between neurological change, social cognition, and knowledge acquisition in human development.

Everyday human action is strikingly complex. In the course of accomplishing our everyday goals and intentions, we move rapidly about the world contacting an enormous array of diverse objects for different purposes, with few pauses to demarcate where one action ends and the next begins. Despite such complexity, when we observe others in action, we readily process the complex motion stream with little conscious effort. As yet, much remains mysterious about the cognitive mechanisms that enable such skilled processing of dynamic human action. One intriguing developmental question is how infants even make a start at identifying distinct acts within the continuous motion stream. This research will pursue two primary goals. The first is to investigate whether infants possess skills for identifying individual actions within the continuous motion stream, and the second is to discover how they might do so. The research will advance knowledge on several fronts. For one, the research will provide new information about basic action-processing skills that are fundamental to children's social and cognitive development. As well, the research will lead to the development of new methods that may ultimately assist in understanding and detecting deficits in action processing; for example, such deficits may be a factor in autism and certain forms of brain damage acquired later in life. Improved understanding of the nature of such deficits may make it possible to design more effective interventions for such individuals, hence improving social and cognitive outcomes.