Rick O. Gilmore, Ph.D. • Research
Major Areas of Focus
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, visually evoked potentials or VEPs, and most recently MRI), 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 BrainLab @ Penn State website, or you may contact the lab by email at psubrainlab@gmail.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.
Development and Dynamics of Cortical Motion Processing
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 colleagues Tony Norcia, Chuan Hou, and Joel Weinstein in collaboration with students in my lab are examining how sensitivity to optic flow and motion signals in general changes early in life and the relationship between optic flow perception and other aspects of visual and motor development. I also have an emerging collaboration with Ennio Mingolla and Florian Raudies at BU involving computational modeling of the developing motion processing system, and with Karen Adolph, John Franchak, and Kari Kretch at NYU on the relationship between gaze patterns and optic flow. Some of this research has been supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF).
In related work, David Rosenbaum, Rich Carlson and I have argued that perceptual/motor and cognitive/intellectual skill acquistion are fundamentally similar.
Representative papers
Fesi, J.D., Yannes, M.P., Brinckman, D.D., Norcia, A.M., Ales, J.M., & Gilmore, R.O.( 2011). Distinct cortical responses to 2D figures defined by motion contrast. Vision Research, 51(19), 2110-2120. doi:10.1016/j.visres.2011.07.015
Weinstein, J.M., Gilmore, R.O., Trescher, W.V., Shaikh, S.M., Tashima, L.M., Boltz, M.E., McAuliffe, M.B., Cheung, A., Fesi, J.D., & Kunselman, A.R. (2011). Defective motion processing in children with cerebral visual impairment due to periventricular white matter damage. Developmental Medicine & Child Neurology, 53, doi:10.1111/j.1469-8749.2010.03874.x
Hou, C., Gilmore, R.O., Pettet, M.W., & Norcia, A.M. (2009). Spatio-temporal tuning of coherent motion evoked responses in 4-6 month-old infants and adults. Vision Research, 49(20), 2509-2517.
Gilmore, R.O., Hou, C., Pettet, M.W., & Norcia, A.M. (2007). Development
of cortical responses to optic flow. Visual Neuroscience, 24,
845-856.
Gilmore, R.O., Baker, T.J., & Grobman, K.H.(2004).
Stability in young infants' discrimination of optic flow. Developmental
Psychology, 40(2), 259-270.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Gilmore, R.O. & Johnson, M.H. (1997). Body-centered representations for visually-guided action emerge in early infancy. Cognition, 65, B1-B9.
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.
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.
Putting It All Together -- How Development Across Domains is Interrelated
Most behavioral scientists study psychological development within a particular domain of function -- perception, action, emotion, memory -- but these divisions may not always reflect the integrated ways in which mind, body, and brain work together to produce adaptive behavior. In collaboration with colleagues at Penn State, I am exploring how the transition to crawling alters infants' emotional and communicative behaviors, among other questions.
Representative paper
Pemberton Roben, C.K., Bass, A.J., Moore, G.A., Murray-Kolb, L.M, Tan, P.Z., Gilmore, R.O., Buss, K.A., Cole, P.M, & Teti, L.O. (2011). Let me go: The influence of crawling experience and temperament on the development of anger expression. Infancy. DOI: 10.1111/j.1532-7078.2011.00092.x