Sabrina Perkins and Anna Grace Gilbert '27 attended and presented research conducted in the Infant Development Lab at a professional conference in Prague, Czech Republic, earlier this month.
Sabrina Perkins, associate professor of psychology and director of the , traveled with psychology major and student researcher Anna Grace Gilbert ’27 to attend and present infancy research at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)聽聽(ICDL) in Prague, Czech Republic.聽
is the world鈥檚 largest technical professional organization and is dedicated to advancing technology for the benefit of humanity. IEEE’s ICDL is a unique meeting of researchers from聽computer science,聽robotics,聽psychology,聽neuroscience and other disciplines to share and discuss research on how humans and other animals learn and develop and how this can inform and be informed by robotics and machine learning systems. The conference was held at聽the faculty of electrical engineering, at the Czech Technical University.
Gilbert presented a co-authored poster with Perkins and collaborator (University of Tennessee Knoxville) titled, 鈥淧lay by Play: Interacting with Targets from Crawling to Walking.鈥 The work, which is still ongoing, uses network analyses to capture infants’ shifts from one target to another during free play sessions across the first two years of life.
Travel to the conference was supported by 黑料不打烊 College, the College of Arts and Sciences, the Undergraduate Research Program, and the Psychology Department. Mentored students in the Infant Development Lab come from a variety of diverse backgrounds and go on to graduate and professional programs.聽The Infant Development Lab focuses on understanding how infants acquire postural and locomotor skills such as sitting, reaching, crawling and walking in the first two years of life.
This research is an extension of on how motor development affects infants’ interactions with their wider environments.