How Behavior Develops
Presented by Karen E. Adolph
This webinar was presented live on Wednesday February 5th, 2025 at 4pm US Eastern time. Through the kindness of the presenter, a recording of the webinar is available here.
Karen E. Adolph, PhD
Behavior is everything we do. It is the outcome of (and provides the input for) multimodal exploration, perception, cognition, motivation, emotion, and social interaction. With age and experience, infant behavior becomes more flexible, adaptive, and functional. How does behavior develop? In the course of everyday activity, infants acquire immense amounts of time-distributed, variable, error-filled practice for every type of foundational behavior researchers have measured. Practice is largely self-motivated, spontaneous, and frequently not goal directed. Formal models suggest that infants’ natural practice regimen—replete with variability and errors—is optimally suited for building a flexible behavioral system to respond adaptively to the constraints and opportunities of continually changing skills in an ever-changing world. I conclude with a proposal that open video sharing will speed progress toward understanding behavior and its development and improve clinical interventions and practice.
Karen E. Adolph is Julius Silver Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience and Professor of Applied Psychology and Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at New York University. She uses observable motor behaviors and a variety of technologies (video, motion tracking, instrumented floor, head-mounted eye tracking, EEG, etc.) to study developmental processes. Adolph directs the Databrary.org video library and PLAY-project.org, and she maintains the Datavyu.org video-coding tool. She completed a Ph.D. at Emory University and postdoctoral fellowship at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. She is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and Association for Psychological Science and Past-President of the International Congress on Infant Studies. She received the Kurt Koffka Medal, Cattell Sabbatical Award, APF Fantz Memorial Award, APA Boyd McCandless Award, ICIS Young Investigator Award, FIRST and MERIT awards from NICHD, and five teaching awards from NYU. She chaired the NIH study section on Motor Function and Speech Rehabilitation and serves on the McDonnell Foundation advisory board and editorial boards of Current Directions in Psychological Science and Developmental Science. Adolph has published 215+ articles and chapters. Her research on perceptual-motor learning and development has been continually funded by NIH and NSF since 1991.
Through the kindness of the presenter, a recording of the webinar is available here.