Karen Adolph

Psychology

Development, Cognition & Perception

Go to my homepage in Psychology.

I use infant motor skill acquisition as a model system to investigate learning and development. My research focuses on behavioral flexibility-how infants adapt to novel and challenging situations. Reserachers in the Infant Motor Development Laboratory challenge infants with novel predicaments to observe how they adapt to potentially risky conditions. Over their first two years of life, babies' bodies, skills, and environments change rapidly and dramatically. To better understand flexibility in infant skill acquisition, our investigations cross traditionally disparate domains of psychology-perceptual, motor, cognitive, and social development.

For example, perceptual learning is both remarkably general (transferring across motor tasks such as navigating over stairs, slopes, and cliffs) and surprisingly specific (not transferring across developmental milestones such as sitting crawling, cruising, and walking). Our telephone and checklist diary studies of infants' everyday locomotor experience have illustrated how, as infants acquire new postures, they must relearn the new relevant parameters and balance-control movements and select their movements adaptively.

Motor learning occurs amidst a flux of dramatic body growth. Practice belly crawling facilitates crawling on hands and knees and practice walking explains more variance in the characteristic improvements in walking skill than do infants' age and body dimensions. Learning to safely navigate the everyday environment requires higher-level cognitive processes such as means/ends exploration, location-learning, and tool-use. In their assessment of potentially risky motor tasks, infants must learn to integrate perceptual information with information obtained from social interactions with caregivers. Expert crawling and walking infants can over-rule their parents' advice when it is ill-informed. Parents' expectations of their infants' motor abilities are often based on unreliable factors such as their infants' gender.

This research program is conducted in collaboration with Catherine Tamis-LeMonda, Marion Eppler, Beatrix Vereijken, Sarah Berger, and Martha Alibali and is supported by grants from the NICHD. The infant development laboratory is outfitted with state of the art motion analysis equipment.

Email: karen.adolph@nyu.edu

• Adolph, K.E. & Eppler, M.A. (2002). Flexibility and specificity in infant motor skill acquisition. In J. Fagan (Ed.), Progress in Infancy Research, 2, 121-167. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. (PDF)
• Adolph, K.E. (2002). Learning to keep balance. In R. Kail (Ed.), Advances in Child Development and Behavior, 30, 1-40.(PDF)
• Adolph, K.E., Eppler, M.A., Marin, L., Weise, I.B., and Clearfield, M.W. (2000). Exploration in the service of prospective control. Infant Behavior and Development: Special Issue on Perception-Action Coupling, 23, 441-460. (PDF)
• Adolph, K.E. (2000). Specificity of learning: Why infants fall over a veritable cliff. Psychological Science, 11, 290-295. (PDF)
• Adolph, K.E.& Eppler, M.A. (1998). Development of visually guided locomotion. Journal of Ecological Psychology: Special Issue on Visually Guided Locomotion, 10, 303-322. (PDF)
• Adolph, K.E., (1997). Learning in the development of infant locomotion. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 56 (3, Serial No. 251).
• Eppler, M.A., Adolph, K.E., & Wiener, T.* (1996). The developmental relationship between exploration and action on sloping surfaces. Infant Behavior and Development, 19, 259-264. (PDF)
• Adolph, K.E. (1995). A psychophysical assessment of toddlers' ability to cope with slopes. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 21 734-750. (PDF)
  
• Adolph, K.E., Eppler, M.A., & Gibson, E.J. (1993). Crawling versus walking infants' perception of affordances for locomotion over sloping surfaces. Child Development: Special Issue on Biodynamics, 64, 1158-1174. (PDF)
• Adolph, K.E., Eppler, M.A. & Gibson, E.J. (1993). Development of perception of affordances. In C. Rovee-Collier & L.P. Lipsett (Eds.), Advances in Infancy Research, 8, 51-98. Norwood, NJ: Ablex. (PDF)

(Funded by NICHD: F5156)