BI 197 Karen Adolph: How Babies Learn to Move and Think

Support the show to get full episodes, full archive, and join the Discord community.

The Transmitter is an online publication that aims to deliver useful information, insights and tools to build bridges across neuroscience and advance research. Visit thetransmitter.org to explore the latest neuroscience news and perspectives, written by journalists and scientists.

Read more about our partnership.

Sign up for the “Brain Inspired” email alerts to be notified every time a new “Brain Inspired” episode is released.

To explore more neuroscience news and perspectives, visit thetransmitter.org.

Karen Adolph runs the Infant Action Lab at NYU, where she studies how our motor behaviors develop from infancy onward. We discuss how observing babies at different stages of development illuminates how movement and cognition develop in humans, how variability and embodiment are key to that development, and the importance of studying behavior in real-world settings as opposed to restricted laboratory settings. We also explore how these principles and simulations can inspire advances in intelligent robots. Karen has a long-standing interest in ecological psychology, and she shares some stories of her time studying under Eleanor Gibson and other mentors.

Finally, we get a surprise visit from her partner Mark Blumberg, with whom she co-authored an opinion piece arguing that "motor cortex" doesn't start off with a motor function, oddly enough, but instead processes sensory information during the first period of animals' lives.

• Infant Action Lab (Karen Adolph's lab)
• Sleep and Behavioral Development Lab (Mark Blumberg's lab)
• Related papers
  • Motor Development: Embodied, Embedded, Enculturated, and Enabling
  • An Ecological Approach to Learning in (Not and) Development
  • An update of the development of motor behavior
  • Protracted development of motor cortex constrains rich interpretations of infant cognition

Read the transcript.