Karen Adolph, Ph.D. - US grants

The overall goal of this research program is to advance understanding of how infants acquire flexibility in motor skill. Functional skills require flexibility because everyday life continually poses new problems that demand new solutions. Even high practiced actions such as sitting, standing, crawling, and walking must be modified on a moment to moment basis to cope with changing biomechanical constraints. The proposed studies will examine the processes and mechanisms by which infants learn to cope with novel situations and the circumstances under which they generalize what they have learned. The emphasis on flexibility shifts the core of this research from descriptions of motor development to central issues in psychology such as learning, memory, and the nature of developmental processes. Specific aim 1 is to examine online adaptation to altered biomechanical constraints. The proposed experiments will identify the variety of strategies infants use to cope with a novel perturbation to balance control, the relative effectiveness of each strategy and the role of experience in facilitating or impeding adaptation. Specific aim 2 is to investigate the exploratory movements that guide locomotion. The proposed experiments will examine how access to visual information about the feet and ground affects infants' search for further information. Specific aim 3 is to test learning and transfer of context- specific cues for guiding locomotion. The proposed experiments ask whether infants can learn to associate visual cues for surface rigidity and friction with the consequences for locomotion. Specific aim 4 is to describe the quantity and context of everyday locomotor experience. Four diary studies will track infants' active and passive experience with stance and locomotion from birth through several weeks after walking onset. Together, this research provides a comprehensive program for investigating how infants cope with varying body in an ever-expanding world. The project will yield a clearer picture of the joint roles of learning and development in achieving flexibility. In addition, results may have practical applications for promoting new skills in typically developing infants and children with motor impairments.

The investigators request the acquisition of a system for the measurement of movement (an OPTOTRAK system to be used in studies of human adults and infants and nonhuman primates (rhesus monkeys). The major users of the equipment are in the Department of Psychology and Center for Neural Science at New York University, and all have worked on aspects of perception and perceptual-motor control. Their approaches and perspectives range from single-cell physiology (Glimcher) to psychophysics (Landy, Maloney) to developmental motor control (Adolph). In each case, the major users have ongoing research projects that would be substantially enhanced by the ability to accurately record movements using the OPTOTRAK system. These projects include analyses of (1) flexible locomotor and postural responses to varying task demands in infants and adults (Adolph, Marin); (2) the responses of neurons in substantia nigra to reinforcement of motor responses whether those responses be an eye or a limb movement (Glimcher); (3) the weights given to different sources of 3-D scene information for perceptual judgments and motor responses to determine whether 3-D representations are shared for vision and action (Maloney, Wolfe); and (4) the cues to distance and viewing geometry used to scale visual cues to size, depth and shape for both vision and action (Landy).

[unreadable] DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The overall goal of this research is to advance understanding of how infants weigh and integrate perceptual and social information for making decisions about action. We address this problem in the context of potentially risky motor tasks, where decisions about action have practical consequences for infants' safety. The aim of Project 1 is to examine the effects of mothers' unsolicited social messages, infants' motor experience, and the relative degree of risk on infants' motor decisions in novel locomotor tasks. In a cross-sectional laboratory experiment. 8- to 18-month old crawling and walking infants from will cope with traversing safe and risky slopes and gaps while mothers vary the content of their social messages (encourage, discourage). The aim of Project 2 is to examine the effects of infants' motor experience and the relative degree of risk on infants' solicitation of maternal support. Again, infants of varying ages and locomotor abilities will cope with traversing safe and risky slopes and gaps, this time while their mothers are present but unavailable. The aim of Project 3 is to chart the microgenetic trajectory of infant-mother negotiations as mothers help their infants to master new, potentially risky locomotor tasks. Mothers will teach their 11- to 18-month-old infants to descend from a high platform during repeated visits to the laboratory. In this laboratory analogue of everyday dyadic negotiation of potential risk, infants and mothers are free to cope with the task as they like. Transfer tests at the end of training will assess whether dyads' negotiations are task-specific. Detailed sequential analyses are woven through Projects 2 and 3 to test for regularities in the temporal unfolding of dyads' negotiations across real and developmental time. The studies test developmental and situational factors that may affect when infants are users and seekers of various sources of information, and whether and how closely mothers attune their communications to infants' level of learning and development. Progress in this area of research promises to illuminate the changing nature of dyadic negotiations as infants master new skills and has practical applications for preventing accidents and promoting skill acquisition in infancy.

Researchers now have access to richer and more detailed behavioral data than ever before. For example, when studying how children learn to walk, researchers can collect eye-tracking data from miniature head-mounted cameras recording the infant's eye movements and field of view, making it possible to see exactly where the child looks while navigating through the environment. Simultaneously, researchers can collect high-speed motion-tracking data detailing the trajectories of the child's limb movements and video data about the child's path relative to caregivers and obstacles, interactions with people, objects, and surfaces, and affective responses while walking, falling, and interacting. Despite the widespread availability of video and other recording technologies, behavioral researchers typically settle for analyzing only one variable in one stream of data, rather than seeking relations among multiple variables across multiple data streams. Powerful data analysis tools and sophisticated data management practices are needed to integrate different kinds of data and relate them to each other tools and practices that few researchers have. In addition, researchers usually work in isolation, seldom sharing data that might illuminate others' research. Without richer analyses and data sharing, theoretical progress in developmental psychology and other fields of behavioral science is hampered. The purpose of this workshop is to delve into the conceptual, technical, and management issues that, when resolved, will allow researchers to perform richer analyses across large, shared, data sets. The workshop will focus in part on the future development of an emerging open-source software tool, OpenSHAPA, and will explore how OpenSHAPA might be extended to encompass new data exploration and visualization tools and promote data management and data sharing. Twenty-two researchers will participate in the workshop, representing the fields of cognitive, perceptual, social, language, and motor development, human-computer interaction, visual analytics, computer science, eResearch, cognitive science, and human factors. Collectively, the invited researchers have experience with different aspects of the problem of exploring rich behavioral data, such as performing massive data visualization, innovative data analyses, integrating multiple data streams, performing custodianship of shared data sets, and creating eResearch communities and data management tools.

The outcomes from the workshop will help to improve the quality of behavioral science. First, findings from the workshop will have an immediate impact on further development of the OpenSHAPA tool, where development is shared across a burgeoning community of users. Possible directions are changes to the architecture to prepare for expansion of data management and data sharing capabilities, building links to existing software, creating libraries of scripts for users to manage data in standardized ways, creating web-based user guides and best practices, expanding user forums, and providing efficient technical support. Research community members can freely adopt OpenSHAPA, expand their current use of it, or build bridges between it and other open source tools, and will bring new users into the community of current users and developers. Second, the richer data analysis that results should support richer theoretical insights. Better data management practices will support more reliable and replicable research, and will better preserve data for future use within and across laboratories. A community of open data sharing practices will lead to greater transparency and efficiency in research and teaching by allowing researchers to inspect each other's data sets and analyses, thereby reducing puzzling failures to replicate, generating new hypotheses, and exposing students to original footage of tasks and findings.

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Behavior develops from a variety of factors interacting across domains and time scales. To capture the richness of behavioral development and to understand its complexity, most developmental scientists record behavior on video. The average developmental science laboratory collects 12 hours of video per week. However, researchers rarely share video data, and this has slowed progress, impeded understanding, and diminished the impact of public investments in behavioral science. The Databrary project aims to increase scientific transparency and accelerate discovery in developmental science by building the culture and infrastructure for developmental researchers to share video data. The project has five aims: (1) Transform the culture of developmental science by building a community of researchers committed to open video data sharing; (2) Expand the free, open source video coding software, OpenSHAPA, to enable coding, exploring, and analyzing video; (3) Build a data management system to support data sharing within laboratories, among collaborators, and in the Databrary repository; (4) Create participant permissions and contributor/user standards that enable open sharing of video data while limiting access to authorized users and ensure participant confidentiality; (5) Create a web-based Databrary repository for open sharing and preservation of video data. The overall innovation of the project is the emphasis on open sharing of video data. The Databrary will be the first large-scale repository for sharing video data and related information. A second important innovation is the emphasis on community building and on transforming the culture in developmental science. The contribution of a particular dataset will no longer depend on the private activities of researchers from one laboratory, but instead benefit from the critique and imagination of many researchers with different viewpoints. Databrary users will be able to view one another's datasets thereby promoting greater transparency and peer oversight and supporting inquiry into data collection methods and measurement. Users will be able to reanalyze shared videos to test competing hypotheses, perform integrative analyses, learn from prior examples, and address new questions beyond the scope of the original study-enabling new possibilities for research in laboratories with limited financial and technical resources. By creating the tools and infrastructure for open video data sharing, we expect to deepen insights in developmental science. Moreover, the Databrary tools and infrastructure will enhance data sharing and management in the entire behavioral science community.

? DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The overall goal of this research is to advance understanding of a critical but unstudied aspect of motor skill acquisition-how children learn about hidden affordances for action. Previous work has focused on children's discovery and implementation of overt affordances such as reaching for objects and squeezing through apertures. Information for overt affordances is readily available through visual and haptic exploration. In contrast, information for affordances of many everyday artifacts is hidden, and requires discovery and implementation of a non-obvious target action. How do young children discover that the graspable cap of a container requires a twisting action or that a closed door requires a pushing or pulling action to open it? Indeed, the closures on artifacts used for self-care, opening cabinets and doors, and so forth require an array of nonobvious actions, but little is known about how children discover and implement the hidden affordances that permeate activities of daily living. We hypothesize two ways that young children can learn about hidden affordances-through the same types of do-it-yourself learning that characterize learning about overt affordances and/or through socially supported learning provided by knowledgeable adults. We will test whether children can discover and implement hidden affordances through (AIM 1) do-it-yourself learning and (AIM 2) socially supported learning across a range of closure types reflecting several activities of daily living (opening containers, flexible pouches, cabinets and doors). We will describe which actions children spontaneously generate and how learning unfolds in real time and across development. Inspired by mothers' natural social support of children's actions, we will test the effectiveness of various types of affordance-specific social information by systematically varying social support and asking how these manipulations affect children's discovery and implementation of the target action. We will characterize when and why children seek social support from adults, and use head-mounted eye tracking to determine whether children direct their visual attention to critical information offered by an adult. Finding on children's do-it-yourself learning about hidden affordances will have implications for designing closures that enable children to perform activities of daily living and for ensuring children's safety by limiting their access to dangerous substances and situations. Findings on socially supported learning will have implications for how parents, teachers, and occupational therapists can help children to perform activities of daily living independently.

A remarkable aspect of motor skill is the ability to plan actions flexibly and purposefully using a variety of objects. We achieve this by planning our initial contact with the object with the end goal in mind, even when the end goal requires multiple steps to be achieved. Thus, the process of action planning involves integration of perception, cognition, and motor behavior. Presumably, a similar integrative process occurs when we anticipate other people's goals while observing them perform actions. Previous work shows that action planning begins in infancy and improves with age, but little is known about the accompanying brain activity that underlies these age-related improvements. This interdisciplinary study combines concepts, methods, and analytic techniques from developmental psychology, neuroscience, and computer science to understand age-related changes in action planning while children 1) perform an action with multiple steps to the goal and 2) while they observe someone else perform the action. The research uses a novel combination of recording methods for children: Video, eye tracking, motion tracking, and electroencephalography (EEG) will be recorded simultaneously. The methods and data will advance the field through open sharing of the research videos and physiological data in the Databrary repository. Algorithms and analysis techniques will be shared in the Open Science Framework.

The investigators combine behavioral measures, neural activity recordings, and machine-learning techniques in order to understand how children and adults 1) perform complex motor tasks that involve anticipation of the end-goal and 2) passively observe others performing tasks that involve multi-step action planning in anticipation of the end-goal. Analyses of action performance will focus on the neural correlates of behavior at different stages of planning and will assess whether neural activity prior to beginning a movement can predict trial-to-trial behavioral variability in young children's ability to plan. Analyses of action observation will investigate age differences in neural activity while observing others performing actions that do, or do not, show evidence of long-range planning. The investigators will also compare the neurophysiological signatures of anticipation during passive action observation and during action performance. These findings will inform our understanding of the development of action planning across childhood. The multi-modal recording methods and the advanced multivariate analytic techniques will pave the way for research in STEM and other disciplines to explore developmental changes in children's brain and behavior.

This award is made as part of the NSF/BSF Opportunity for Collaborations in Economics and Psychology.

Project Summary The proposed work on infant walking tests critical hypotheses about the development of behavioral flexibility, a fundamental hallmark of motor skill. Flexibility is the ability to tailor motor actions to changes in body-environment relations. Flexibility is essential to functional, adaptive action because the body and environment are always in flux. Changes in local conditions?body growth, variations in clothing/footgear, carrying objects, variations in ground surfaces, elevations, and obstacles in the path? alter the biomechanical constraints on action. One theory of flexibility claims that learning particular solutions to particular motor problems cannot ensure the ability to cope with the novelty and variability that characterize everyday activity. Rather, infants must learn HOW to solve new motor problems by exploring the current body-environment relations, discerning the critical information regarding which actions are possible, and assembling appropriate solutions in the moment. The proposed experiments will test critical hypotheses generated by this theory. Aim 1 tests the hypothesis that flexibility in infant walking generalizes across tasks with different body-environment relations. We will test individual infants (from novice to experienced walkers) in four tasks?at the edge of a precipice on slopes, drop-offs, bridges, and gaps. We predict that flexibility will generalize across tasks and the level of flexibility across tasks depends on the duration of infants' everyday walking experience. We also predict that more efficient, discerning exploratory behaviors predict higher levels of flexibility. Aim 2 tests the hypothesis that experience with varied body-environment relations promotes flexibility. Merely repeating the same actions over and over should not lead to flexibility. We will compare responses by infants receiving intense training on a ?body-environment obstacle course? to infants receiving sham training and infants receiving only everyday walking experience. Aim 3 will identify critical factors that instigate infants' experience with varied body-environment relations by comparing infants' spontaneous locomotor activity in four toy conditions and two social-interaction conditions. The proposed studies use innovative procedures (a ?body-environment obstacle course,? a new cross-task normalization method, new ways of using head-mounted eye tracking) and technologies (instrumented playroom floor to record spontaneous walking, gait modifications, standard measures of gait maturity, path shape, distance travelled, and area explored) to move the field forward. The rich, detailed data will be shared in the Databrary library for other researchers and clinicians to use to ask new questions outside the scope of the proposed project. Findings will have important implications for preventing accidental injury from falling from a height, a leading cause of injury in infants. A Scientific Advisory Committee for Translational Clinical Science will ensure the clinical relevance of the work.

PROJECT SUMMARY The overall goal of the PLAY (Play & Learning Across a Year) project is to catalyze discovery about behavioral development in infancy. PLAY will focus on the critical period from 12 to 24 months of age when infants show remarkable advances in language, object interaction, locomotion, and emotion regulation. PLAY will leverage the joint expertise of 63 ?launch group? researchers, and capitalize on the Databrary video-sharing library and Datavyu video-coding tool to exploit the power of video to reveal the richness and complexity of behavior. Together, PLAY researchers will collect, transcribe, code, share, and use a video corpus of infant and mother naturalistic activity in the home to test behavioral, developmental, and environmental cascades. The project will demonstrate the value and feasibility of a cross-domain synergistic approach, and advance new ways to use video as documentation to facilitate discovery and ensure transparency and reproducibility. Aim 1 is to create the first, cross-domain, large-scale, transcribed, coded, and curated video corpus of human behavior?collected with a common protocol and coded with common criteria jointly developed by the launch group. The corpus will consist of videos of 900 infant-mother dyads (300 12-, 18-, and 24-month-olds) from 30 diverse sites across the United States. Videos will be transcribed and coded for infant and mother communicative acts, gestures, object interactions, locomotion, and emotion. The corpus will be augmented with video home tours and questionnaire data on infant language, temperament, locomotion/fall injuries, gender identity and socialization; home environment and media use; and family health and demographics. Aim 2 is to leverage the potential of time-locked video codes to test critical questions about behavioral, developmental, and environmental cascades?from one domain to another, between infants and mothers, and from the macro environment (e.g., SES, geographic region, home language) and proximal home environment (e.g., objects for play, home chaos and clutter) to infant and mother behaviors. Aim 3 is to advance new ways to use video as documentation to ensure scientific transparency and reproducibility. The entire protocol and code definitions are documented in a wiki with exemplar video clips to illustrate text-based descriptions. The entire corpus and all tools will be openly shared with the developmental and behavioral science communities on Databrary and in other language and behavior repositories (CHILDES, HomeBank, WordBank, OSF). PLAY will create a cross-domain, shared video corpus of unprecedented scope and richness. It will provide launch group members and the larger research community with the data, tools, and know-how to use time-locked video codes to investigate the unfolding of natural behavior in real time. The novel, synergistic approach to crowdsourcing the research will reduce overall costs while increasing scientific payoffs. The use of shared video as both data and documentation will accelerate the pace of discovery in developmental science.