Miami-based research in the areas of perceptual, cognitive, and social development in infants and young children.
The purpose of our studies is to gain a better understanding of how infants and children learn to perceive, categorize, and remember the objects and events in their environment, both social and nonsocial. In a world of multimodal stimulation to all the senses, how do infants determine which sights and sounds belong together and constitute unitary events and which are unrelated? And how do they learn to attend to stimulation that is relevant to their needs and actions and ignore the vast array of stimulation that is irrelevant? Our goal is to understand how attention, perception and learning develop across the first two years of life and thus to gain insight into how this process goes awry in atypical development such as autism. We test typically developing infants and children as well as children with autism spectrum disorder in tasks of attention and intersensory perception and are interested in contributing to the early identification of autism as well as to the construction of theories of typical developmental processes
The Infant Development Lab was established in 1984 and is affiliated with the Psychology Department at Florida International University. It is a federally funded, non -profit research program directed by Dr. Lorraine E. Bahrick, Professor of Psychology. A number of undergraduate and graduate students, post docs, and staff members participate in research in the areas of perceptual and cognitive development.
Since the lab's establishment approximately 10,000 babies, ranging in age from three weeks to eight months, have been tested in our lab. We typically conduct between eight and ten different studies simultaneously, each designed for infants of a specific age. Our studies have revealed that babies are able to understand a lot more about their world than what was previously thought.
Research in the Infant Development Lab is supported by grants from the National Institute of Health.
