The human brain undergoes its most rapid and dramatic period of development in the first two years of life, and yet we understand astonishingly little about the impact of early brain development on the emergence of perception, thought, or action. My research incorporates behavioral studies, brain imaging techniques (EEG, ERP, and visually evoked potentials or VEPs), and computational modeling in order to examine how the mind and brain develop in infancy and early childhood.

This page describes the main themes of my research program. Additional information is located on the BabyLab@Penn State website, or you may contact the lab by email at psubrainlab@mac.com.

If you are a freshman, sophomore or junior with interests in biology, perception, or development, and you would like to join the Brain Development Lab research team, please complete an on-line application. Graduate students should contact me directly via email.

Where am I -- The development of spatial perception

Perceiving spatial relationships -- where objects and the observer are located relative to one another -- is a cornerstone of perceptual and cognitive processing. Because humans are mobile animals, we must represent space in flexible, dynamic ways. In collaboration with Mark Johnson, Jordy Kaufmann, Janice Brown, Sarah Paterson, and others, we have shown that this flexibility in spatial processing emerges gradually over development. The starting state is a primitive, eye-centered or retinocentric representation that may be specified by the early developing anatomy of the visual system. Thus, changes in children's abilities to perceive space in more flexible, dynamic ways may reveal patterns of normal or disturbed development of the brain's circuitry for spatial perception.

Representative papers:

Kaufman, J., Gilmore, R.O., & Johnson, M.H. (2006). Frames of reference for anticipatory action in 4-month-old infants. Infant Behavior and Development, 29, 322-333. reprint in PDF

Brown, J., Johnson, M.H., Paterson, S., Gilmore, R.O, Gsödl, M, Longhi, E., & Karmiloff-Smith, A. (2003). Spatial representation and attention in toddlers with Williams syndrome and Down syndrome. Neuropsychologia, 41(8), 1037-1046. reprint in PDF

Johnson, M.H. & Gilmore, R.O. (1998). Object-centered representations in 8-month-old infants. Developmental Science, 1, 221-225. reprint in PDF

Gilmore, R.O. & Johnson, M.H. (1997). Body-centered representations for visually-guided action emerge in early infancy. Cognition, 65, B1-B9. reprint in PDF

Gilmore, R.O., & Johnson, M.H. (1997). Egocentric action in early infancy: Spatial frames of reference for saccades. Psychological Science, 8(3), 224-230.

Johnson, M.H., Gilmore, R.O., Tucker, L.A., & Minister, S.L. (1996). Cortical development and saccadic control: Evidence for vector summation in young infants. Proceedings of TENNET VI, Montreal, Canada. Brain & Cognition, 32(2), 237-243.

Where am I going -- The development of perception for action

One of the most important problems a moving organism must solve is the accurate perception of the direction and speed of self-motion. Optic flow, the structured pattern of visual motion generated by a moving observer, provides one of the most powerful sources of information about the observer's movement. Despite its importance, surprisingly little is known about the development of optic flow perception early in life. My students and are examining how sensitivity to optic flow changes early in life and the relationship between optic flow perception and other aspects of visual and motor development. Some of this research has supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Follow the links for examples of the sorts of heading changes young infants can and cannot discriminate.

In related work, David Rosenbaum, Rich Carlson and I have argued that perceptual/motor and cognitive/intellectual skill acquistion are fundamentally similar.

Representative papers:

Gilmore, R.O., Hou, C., Pettet, M.W., & Norcia, A.M. (2007). Development of cortical responses to optic flow. Visual Neuroscience,24, 845-856. reprint in PDF

Gilmore, R.O., Baker, T.J., & Grobman, K.H.(2004). Stability in young infants' discrimination of optic flow. Developmental Psychology, 40(2), 259-270. reprint in PDF

Gilmore, R.O., & Rettke, H.R. (2003). Four-month-olds' discrimination of optic flow patterns depicting different directions of observer motion. Infancy, 4(2), 177-200. reprint in PDF

Gilmore, R.O. (2003). Where are they going? The perception of information about visual direction in young infants. In B. Hopkins & S.P. Johnson (Eds.), Neurobiology of Infant Vision, Advances in Infancy Research. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers. 181-21.

Rosenbaum, D.A., Carlson, R.A. & Gilmore, R.O. (2003). Acquisition of intellectual and perceptual/motor skill. Annual Review of Psychology, 52, 453-470. reprint in PDF

Why do babies get bored -- The development of learning and memory

Habituation, or the decline in behavioral responsiveness to repeated stimulation, is a simple form of learning. The predominant method for studying infant's perceptual and cognitive capacities, habituation remains poorly understood. Hoben Thomas, Mike Dahlin and I have been reexamining patterns of infant habituation from a quantitative perspective. We seek to determine what is the shape of the habituation function for individual infants, what sort of cognitive process might give rise to observed patterns of habituation, and whether sophisticated statistical approaches can provide more information to the investigator than current, largely atheoretic, techniques. Some of this work is funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). In other related work with Mark Johnson, I have explored the development of infants' working memory capacities.

Representative papers:

Thomas, H., & Gilmore, R.O. (2004). Habituation assessment in infancy: From infant control to investigator control. Psychological Methods, 9(1), 70-92. Reprint in PDF

Gilmore, R.O. & Thomas, H. (2002). Examining individual differences in infants’ habituation patterns using objective quantitative techniques. Infant Behavior and Development, 153, 1-14. reprint in PDF

Gilmore, R.O. & Johnson, M.H. (1995). Working memory in infancy: Six-month-olds' performance on two versions of the oculomotor delayed response task. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 59, 397-418. reprint in PDF.