Robert Lickliter - US grants

How the individual sensory modalities relate to one another and how their functions are integrated during development has been the subject of increasing research attention. Studies that manipulate the amount, type, or timing of sensory experience over prenatal and early postnatal development are, however, difficult to undertake with human infants and a comparative approach utilizing animal embryos and infants offers a useful and important step in experimentally examining such issues. Recent evidence derived from precocial avian embryos and neonates has demonstrated that prenatal stimulation in one sensory modality can influence responsiveness to stimulation in other sensory modalities, showing the strong link between the modalities during early development. The bases for these effects remains unexplored. The primary goal of this proposed research is to identify the roles played by unimodal and multimodal sensory stimulation in the emergence and maintenance of early intersensory perception. Nine experiments utilizing precocial avian embryos and hatchlings are proposed that examine the roles of embryonic arousal and attention in early intersensory responsiveness, assess the role of intersensory redundancy in the perceptual learning of embryos and hatchlings, investigate the role of amodal temporal and spatial stimulus properties in the detection and processing of multimodal stimulation, and assess the features of social interaction that foster the emergence of intersensory functioning. The findings of the proposed research will provide basic behavioral data on the experiential processes that underlie perinatal intersensory perception, contribute to a better understanding of the complex relationship between prenatal and postnatal ontogeny, and provide an important source of comparative data for the research projects of Bahrick, Mundy, and Rochat concerned with intersensory development in the human infant.

The South Florida Research Consortium on the Development of Attention, Perception, Learning, and Memory will apply a developmental framework to foster the integration of biological, psychological, and social levels of analysis to the understanding of selective attention, perceptual processing, learning and memory during infancy and early childhood. The consortium will integrate research across species (utilizing both animal and human subjects), across developmental stages (from prenatal through early childhood), and across levels (neural, psychobiological, psychological, and social). A primary theme of the project is a focus on making research, theory, and application more ecologically relevant to multimodal natural learning contexts. Additional themes include: addressing the nature and basis of developmental change and growth from infancy to early childhood and investigating the mechanisms of early learning and generalization.

At the catalyst stage, this project will initiate and support workshops, planning meetings, and pilot research collaborations that can address a range of content areas including: the development of object and event perception, biological bases of early learning and memory, the development of language and communicative functioning, social and emotional development, and early cognitive development. This collaborative effort will contribute to theory construction and the development of an integrated knowledge base in the science of learning that can be easily translated to applications in education. Core and affiliated faculty concentrated at three universities in South Florida that will provide a rich and diverse set of resources and a critical intellectual mass for collaborative interdisciplinary research and for creating an infrastructure necessary for a future SLC proposal.

Broader impacts that will result from this proposed activity include applying newly discovered fundamental principles of learning and development from interdisciplinary efforts to education. The consortium will promote unique opportunities for training of investigators and students through the cross-fertilization of traditionally separate domains of knowledge and expertise, thereby fostering a synergistic effect on the growth of a science of learning. Further, the project's focus on the theme of ecological validity will facilitate easy translation between theory and application of findings to naturalistic learning contexts such as the social environment or the classroom setting.

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The ability to perceive and integrate multimodal information is fundamental to perception, cognition, and action. How the individual sensory modalities relate to one another and how their functions are integrated during early development have received increasing research attention in psychology, psychobiology, and the neurosciences. Studies that manipulate the amount, type, and timing of sensory experience during prenatal and early postnatal development are difficult to undertake with human fetuses and infants and a comparative approach utilizing animal embryos and infants offers a useful step in experimentally examining these important topics. Evidence derived from avian and mammalian species has consistently demonstrated that there are differential effects of unimodal and multimodal stimulation on neural, physiological, and behavioral responsiveness during early development. The basis and mechanisms for these effects remain relatively unexplored. The primary goals of this proposed research are to study how unimodal and multimodal sensory experience serves to maintain, facilitate, or interfere with the usual course of intersensory development and to determine the role of intersensory redundancy in guiding and constraining early attentional, perceptual, and learning abilities. Behavioral and physiological evidence obtained from quail embryos and infants in my lab has suggested that the spatially coordinated and temporally synchronous presentation of the same information across two or more senses (intersensory redundancy) can selectively recruit attention and facilitate perceptual learning during the perinatal period. This competing continuation proposal is designed to further explore this facilitative effect of intersensory redundancy and its implications for unimodal and multimodal functioning. Five Specific Aims will focus on the effects of redundancy on (1) selective attention, (2) generalization of learning, (3) memory, (4) behavioral and physiological arousal, and (5) sensitivity to temporal and spatial properties of multimodal stimulation. This program of research will contribute to a better understanding of the complex relationship between prenatal and postnatal ontogeny by providing a core of basic behavioral and physiological data on the arousal, attentional, and experiential processes that contribute to the emergence and maintenance of intersensory perception.

In this project, Dr. Lickliter will examine whether and to what extent prenatal sensory experience contributes to the emergence and development of postnatal social responsiveness. Although social responsiveness is a fundamental characteristic of human infant behavior and supports emotional, cognitive, and language development, little is currently known about the possible roles of prenatal sensory experience in neonatal social behavior. As a result of this gap in our knowledge, some developmental scientists have suggested that infant social responsiveness is innate, independent of prior experience. Our lack of knowledge in this area is due in part to the very restricted prenatal manipulations possible with human fetuses. Working with an animal model, the bobwhite quail, Dr. Lickliter and his research team have previously shown that prenatal sensory experience plays a key role in establishing postnatal perceptual preferences in the neonate. This research project will extend this work to determine what types of prenatal experiences facilitate the emergence of early social skills, including social orienting, social contingency detection and learning, and the ability for individual recognition of social partners. By comparing quail chicks who received modified prenatal sensory experience with chicks who received typical patterns of prenatal sensory experience, this project will uncover what types and amounts of prenatal experience promote or interfere with the development of neonatal social responsiveness. The findings of this project will provide a foundation for understanding the relationship between prenatal experience and postnatal behavior and will inform research directions for human-based studies of early perceptual, cognitive, and social development.

The results of this work will allow better integration of the prenatal period into current theories of both typical and atypical behavioral development. For example, the findings obtained can inform the care and management of preterm infants, who make up 12% of births in the US and are at risk for atypical perceptual, cognitive, and social outcomes as a result of being deprived of normal patterns of prenatal sensory experience. The project will also provide multiple training opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students from ethnically diverse backgrounds. The results of this work will be broadly disseminated in presentations at conferences, colloquia, journal publications, and book chapters.

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): In the past decade, it has become increasingly clear that among the problems with U.S. graduate education and the research endeavor is the issue of diversity. As the 2005 Woodrow Wilson Foundation report, Diversity & the Ph.D., noted, while African Americans and Hispanics together currently constitute approximately 1/3 of the U.S. citizens in the Ph.D. candidate age range, they only receive 7% of the doctorate degrees. This disparity constitutes a large untapped resource for the scientific research workforce. Census Bureau numbers point to the increasing diversity in the U.S. population. This view is echoed again in the 2010 Commission on the Future of Graduate Education in the U.S. Report. Additionally, as Amri Johnson (The Scientist 2005) notes ... it has become increasingly clear to a growing body of scientist and policy maker that building a diverse pool of scientists and clinica investigators is mission critical in our efforts to reduce health disparities. Accordingly, there re important national considerations for increasing the participation of under- represented groups in biomedical research. Florida International University (FIU) is an urban, public research university located in Miami, Florida's largest population center. With over 44,000 students (72% underrepresented minority students), Health as a mission area, and its stated goal to be one of the nation's top 25 public urban research universities, FIU, through this proposed FIU MBRS RISE Program, provides a significant opportunity to develop more underrepresented scientists for biomedical research. This multifaceted RISE Program will, through student biomedical research oriented development activities at FIU: 1) build the biomedical research atmosphere in general; 2) encourage underrepresented students at FIU to view biomedical research as a viable career option; and 3) for those that chose that path, prepare them for success in their biomedical career endeavors. This will be achieved through two initiatives. The Student Research Experience Initiative will provide a selected group of fifteen undergraduate and seventeen graduate students an intense research experience and other training to promote their success as future biomedical research scientists. The Biomedical Research Initiative will provide biomedical research exposure and training to the larger university audience through an annual symposium and a supervised independent biomedical research experience. The proposed FIU program will further the MBRS Program goals of increasing the number of currently underrepresented scientists engaged in biomedical research.

Social responsiveness, reacting in a socially engaged way to the actions of others, is a fundamental characteristic of infant behavior and contributes to the type and quality of social interaction infants experience. Early social interactions play an important role in supporting emotional, cognitive, and language development. Even prenatal experience can influence infants' later development. For example, hearing mothers' speech late in pregnancy enables infants to recognize their native language immediately after birth. However, there has been little research to date regarding how prenatal experience contributes to the development of infant social motivation, social learning, or social memory. The primary goal of this project is to investigate how maternal behaviors during the prenatal period contribute to social motivation, social recognition, and social learning and memory after birth.

Ethical considerations limit opportunities to conduct experimental research on prenatal experience. A comparative approach using animal models helps to bridge this gap. In contrast to mammals where the prenatal environment is difficult to access and manipulate, the avian egg environment can be experimentally manipulated independent of the mother and thereby provides an excellent animal model for testing predictions about prenatal factors underlying subsequent postnatal development. This project will compare quail chicks who received typical patterns of prenatal experience with chicks who received modified maternally derived prenatal experience. The central hypothesis is that maternally regulated prenatal sensory stimulation, concentrations of hormones of maternal origin in the prenatal environment, and amounts of prenatal movement and light exposure contribute to the development of infant social responsiveness. The findings of this project will provide a foundation for a better understanding of the links between prenatal experience and postnatal behavior, and will inform research directions for human-based studies of early social development.

How do infants make sense of the world around them? This project examines the possibility that infant attention is initially drawn to the intersensory redundancy that occurs when the same information is perceived through more than one sensory system. An example of intersensory redundancy is the information common to the movements of the face and sounds of the voice of a person speaking. Multiple measures will be used to determine: (1) whether infants pay attention to information provided by intersensory redundancy before paying attention to other types of information, (2) whether intersensory redundancy helps infants process information more efficiently, and (3) areas of the brain involved in intersensory processing in infancy. Answering these questions will provide insight into how infants learn from caregivers. This project will have broader impacts through training graduate and undergraduate students in cognitive neuroscience, which will increase the participation of underrepresented groups in STEM fields. Findings may also contribute to understanding deficits children with disabilities experience processing audiovisual speech. <br/><br/>This project has three major aims that will be addressed in a series of experiments on 5- and 10-month-old infants. Aim 1 examines how intersensory redundancy affects infants’ attention and learning from audiovisual speech, using simultaneous measures of heart rate changes associated with attention and electroencephalogram (EEG) measures of attention and memory. Aim 2 examines whether infants’ attention can be biased toward or away from intersensory redundancy by providing specific types of information during initial learning prior to EEG testing. Aim 3 is to determine which areas of the brain are involved in intersensory processing of audiovisual speech in infancy, using computational modeling of EEG data. Infants are expected to show enhanced brain activity to redundant information provided by audiovisual speech, and areas of prefrontal cortex are expected to be involved in processing intersensory redundancy in infancy.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.