Marshall Myron Haith - US grants

This application is concerned with visual development in early infancy. Our broad, long-term objective is to understand how people develop a stable knowledge or cognitive model of their visual world. Our specific aims include work on 10 studies of visual scanning in human and rhesus infants that we initiated during the prior grant period. I also propose 10 new studies to: 1) test a provision of a concept that is designed to account for infant visual activity in a wide range of situations; b) study the role of the visual consequences of eye movements in visual organization; c) investigate the development of visual anticipation. Finally, plans to test a practical application of our anticipation work with infants at risk are described. Our method employs infrared corneal-and retinal-reflection video recording of visual fixation sequences over visual displays. Through analysis of the visual scanning records and derived eye-movement parameters, we draw inferences about visual information-acquisition strategies, the task the baby is trying to accomplish, what the infant can see and how (s) he organizes her/his visual world.

This application focuses primarily on the formation of visual expectations in infants who range from 3 to 8 months of age. For the principal paradigm we use, eye movements and visual fixations are recorded while infants watch series of pictures that vary in predictability. Our recording method employs infrared corneal and retinal-reflection video of the infants' eyes, stored on videotape. Through analysis of the infants' eye movements, we draw inferences about whether a baby forms expectations for the pictures before they appear. Anticipatory fixations provide one index of these expectations. For those cases in which anticipations do not occur, facilitated reaction times to picture onsets provide a second index. The proposed experiments fall into four categories. First, we ask what types of physical event information infants are able to use to form expectations. Second, we explore psychological processes that constrain expectations and changes in these constraints with age. Third, we attempt to determine the cognitive skills infants use in the Visual Expectation Paradigm by comparing infants' performance in this paradigm with their performance in other paradigms. Finally, we examine expectation formation as an index of stable infant cognitive functioning by longitudinal infant and early childhood studies and by assessment of performance of infants at psychological risk due to fetal exposure to alcohol. The goal of these studies is twofold: 1) to establish a solid base of information about how infants begin to organize their behavior around future events, and 2) to exploit infants' natural tendency to form expectations about their world to identify specific cognitive processes that are responsible for stable intellectual functioning in early childhood.

This is a competing continuation application for a Research Scientist Award. My broad objective for this project is to continue my research and conceptualization efforts in the area of the development of future-oriented processes. The core research effort will be in human infancy where we study the baby's ability to form visual expectations through the first year of life. This project will constitute the majority of my research effort. Typically, we index babies' expectations by their anticipatory eye movements and reaction times to visual events. Issues in five domains will bc addressed: 1) what information babies use to form expectations, 2) development change and individual differences in babies' tendencies to form expectations, 3) whether babies code expectations in terms of rules as opposed to expectations being completely embedded in action, 4) the extent to which babies can form expectations for increasingly complex rules with age, and 5) whether babies' ability to form expectations for discrete events that they do not control relates to their expectation for continuous events and/or events that they can control. In addition to this core effort, I have several branch objectives for continuation of collaborations in which I play a less major role. The first of these involves research on the genetics of intelligence through application of the infant visual-expectation paradigm to twin-infant studies and through follow-up of infants into early childhood where we measure both visual and manual anticipation and reaction time. A second objective concerns research on perception-action components of skilled behavior. Still a third branch objective involves research aimed at assessing what future-oriented domains develop between 9-36 months of age and 3-7 years of age, using interview and questionnaire techniques at first, with an aim to develop new experimental paradigms. A final aim is to promote the area of the development of future-oriented processes as an important field of study through continuing leadership of a national MacArthur-funded research interest group.

We propose to study the acquisition of locomotor skills in infancy and to examine the relations between locomotor and psychological development during the transition from prelocomotion to self-produced prone locomotion (e.g., creeping and crawling). Our specific aims are to: (a) develop quantitative measures of the organization of skills that underlie the acquisition of self-produced locomotion; and (b) use these measures to examine the relations between the acquisition of locomotor skill and shifts in spatial, cognitive and perceptual development. Two equally important and related sets of studies are proposed. The first set of five studies will provide basic information about the motoric processes that underlie the acquisition of self-produced locomotor skills. Study 1 is a normative longitudinal study of the transition from prelocomotion to the acquisition of prone self-produced locomotion. Study 2 extends study 1 by comparing our measures of locomotor skill with the judgments of pediatric physical therapists to determine if our quantitative measures of self-produced locomotion captures aspects of this skill which are important to practitioners. In studies 3 - 5 we will experimentally manipulate locomotor-skill performance to determine how locomotor skills are organized and reorganized when interventions are introduced that serve to impede or facilitate locomotion. The second set of three studies are designed to determine the extent to which important psychological changes follow in time, coincide with, are mediated by, or are maintained by the acquisition of locomotor skills. Study 6 will examine the relation between active and passive locomotor experience. The question is how sensorimotor-based knowledge affects spatial relations in an object search task. Study 7 will test whether self-produced locomotion is the mechanism by which self-movement is discriminated from world-movement when vestibular and visual information are placed in conflict in the context of a "moving room." Study 8 will examine how locomotor experience facilitates the baby's understanding of distance and size-constancy relations in order to coordinate perspectival transformations.

People learn a remarkable variety of perception-action skills during their lifetime, from playing sports and musical instruments to operating vehicles and using computers. Our ability to acquire such skills in relatively short periods of time is remarkable and unique. Other animals perform highly skilled actions, but are unable to learn new skills beyond relatively narrow behavioral limits. Understanding how such skills are acquired and performed is critical for building theories of human learning and action. This knowledge is also important for devising optimal training techniques and for designing machines capable of skilled action. Unfortunately, very little is known about the processes that underlie the acquisition and performance of skilled action. The present research will examine skill learning and performance on especially designed computer-controlled video tasks. In these tasks, expertise takes considerable time to develop and requires the precise coordination of many different actions. These skills are similar to the kinds of perception-action skills used in a wide variety of everyday contexts. The project will consist of three studies. The first study will examine some of the characteristics that define skill at different levels of expertise. In particular, it will assess whether differences between experts, intermediates, and novices reside primarily in the individual component skills required for a task or primarily in how the components are combined. The results from this study will permit the isolation of the features of skill that contribute most to high levels of expertise. The second study will examine the learning mechanisms involved in the acquisition of expertise. Complete novices will practice over eight sessions. A complete record of performance will be collected, as well as interview data of people's understanding of the task. These data will permit the documentation of the phases of learning subjects pass through in acquiring expertise and how different types of knowledge contribute to the learning process. The third study will explore the specific ways in which observing others' performances affects learning. It will examine how the effect of observing others depends on when the observation occurs and on the level of expertness of the observed performance. The findings will be important for understanding how learning processes utilize different types of information as well as for suggesting techniques for increasing the speed of learning. This research promises to provide important information on how people acquire complex skills and insights into designing optimal methods of instruction.

health science research; university;

biomedical equipment purchase;

biomedical equipment purchase;

biomedical equipment purchase;