Richard N. Aslin

Richard N. Aslin

PhD, University of Minnesota, 1975
William R. Kenan Professor, Brain & Cognitive Sciences and Center for Visual Science
Director, Rochester Center for Brain Imaging

Contact Information

  • Meliora 406
  • Brain & Cognitive Sciences
  • University of Rochester
  • Rochester, NY 14627-0268
  • (585) 275-8687 (office)
  • (585) 275-4621 (lab)
  • (585) 442-9216 (fax)

Office Hours

By appointment.

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Research Overview

During the course of development, human infants gather information about the external world without the benefit of an extensive base of knowledge that adults automatically bring to bear on perceptual, motor, cognitive, and language tasks. What mechanisms allow infants to acquire this initial level of information and how does that information guide subsequent learning?

My research approaches this question from both bottom-up and top-down perspectives. Basic sensory, perceptual, and motor systems show remarkable improvements in the first 6 months after birth. In turn, these systems are subject to powerful modifications by robust learning mechanisms. My most recent work has been directed to the rapid learning of co-occurrence relations in temporal and spatial events. This statistical learning enables adults, children, infants, and monkeys to group sounds based solely on the distributional information (conditional probabilities) contained within the sound stream. It also enables adults and infants to segment and group visual features in scenes. These examples of unsupervised statistical learning illustrate that it is likely to play an important role in many domains, with more specialized (and highly constrained) forms of learning building on these domain- and species-general mechanisms.

In the past few years, my research has moved toward studies of brain function in adults and infants using fMRI and optical imaging, respectively. A new 3T magnet facility (http://www.rcbi.rochester.edu) has enabled a collaboration with Kate Pirog and Michael Tanenhaus in which we are measuring activations in area MT/MST to novel words that have been linked during a lexical learning task to referents which have the property of motion. This allows us to determine if similar sounding words also activate MT/MST even if they do not have the referential property of motion, thereby serving as a measure of lexical competition. A new optical imaging system (Hitachi ETG-4000) provides a 48-channel measure of hemodynamic activity in the superficial layers of cortex while infants are being presented with controlled stimulation. This system will not only serve to assess activations in various regions of the infant brain, but it will be combined with heart rate and ERP measures to further define the underlying responses as infants look/listen to stimuli. We are particularly interested in how these signals change over time in comparison to looking-time measures as a way of understanding aspects of habituation and learning.

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Selected Publications

Curriculum Vitae

2008-2009 PUBLICATIONS

STATISTICAL LEARNING (auditory)

STATISTICAL LEARNING (visual)

SPOKEN WORD RECOGNITION

INFANT SPEECH PERCEPTION

INFANT VISUAL PERCEPTION

INFANCY METHODS

PERCEPTUAL ADAPTATION

CHAPTERS AND COMMENTARIES

  • Aslin, R. N. (2008). Headed in the right direction: A commentary on Yoshida and Smith.  Infancy, 13,  275-278.
  • Aslin, R. N. (2006). Processes of change in brain and cognitive development: The final word. In M. Johnson & Y. Munakata (Eds.), Attention and Performance XXI: Processes of change in brain and cognitive development. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Aslin, R. N. and Schlagger, B. L. (2006). Is myelination the precipitating neural event for language development in infants and toddlers?  Neurology, 66, 304-305.
  • Aslin, R.N., & Hunt, R.H. (2001). Development, plasticity, and learning in the auditory system. In C. A. Nelson & M. Luciana (Eds.), Handbook of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 205-220.
  • Aslin, R.N. (2000). Why take the cog out of infant cognition? Infancy, 1, 463-470.
  • Aslin, R.N., Jusczyk, P.W., & Pisoni, D.B. (1998). Speech and auditory processing during infancy: Constraints on and precursors to language. In D. Kuhn & R. Siegler (Eds.), Handbook of Child Psychology, Fifth edition. Volume 2: Cognition, Perception and Language (W. Damon, series editor). New York: Wiley, pp. 147-198.

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Research Collaborators

  • Andrew Berger, Assistant Professor, Institute of Optics, University of Rochester
  • Jeffry Coady, Assistant Professor, Department of Communication Disorders, Boston University
  • József Fiser, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, Brandeis University
  • Andrea Gebhart, Research Associate, Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester
  • Marc Hauser, Professor, Department of Psychology, Harvard University
  • Robert A. Jacobs, Professor, Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester
  • Scott P. Johnson, Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, New York University
  • Jessica Maye, Assistant Professor, Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders, Northwestern University
  • Elissa L. Newport, George Eastman Professor, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester
  • Jenny Saffran, Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  • Daniel Swingley, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania
  • Michael Tanenhaus, Professor, Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences, University of Rochester
  • Daniel Weiss, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, Pennsylvania State University
  • David Williams, Director, Center for Visual Science, University of Rochester

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Research Support

  • "Visual statistical learning in human infants," NIH Grant (HD-37082), 2003-2008.
  • "Program grant to develop Near-infrared Spectroscopy in combination with ERPs and fMRI to assess cognitive development in human infants and young children," McDonnell Foundation (220020096), 2007-2010.
  • "Complex learning and skill transfer with video games", ONR-MURI grant, PI Daphne Bavelier, 2007-2010.
  • "Time course of spoken word recognition," NIH grant (DC-05071), PI Michael K. Tanenhaus, 2007-2012.

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Courses

Undergraduate

Graduate

  • BCS 561: Speech Perception and Recognition
  • BCS 562: Statistical Learning
  • BCS 565: Language and the Brain

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Current Graduate Students & Postdocs

Shukla, Mohinish
Postdoc, Ph.D. 2006, SISSA, Trieste, Italy, statistical learning, phonological development, near-infrared spectroscopy
Katherine White
Postdoc, Ph.D. 2006, Brown University, phonological acquisition and lexical development in infants; eye-tracking
Meghan Clayards
Grad student, B.Sc. 2001, University of Victoria, interactions between speech perception and spoken word recognition, cue-weighting, eye-tracking
Neil Bardhan
Grad student, B.A. 2004, Johns Hopkins University, speech perception, phonological learning and lexical processing, eye-tracking
Austin Frank
Grad student, B.A. 2004, Columbia University, speech production, phonological and lexical adaptation, computational models of language production
Vikranth Rao
Grad student, B.S. 2004, SUNY-Buffalo, computational models of cognition, cue reliability and development, statistical learning
Celeste Kidd
Grad student, B.A. 2007, University of Southern California, speech perception and lexical development in infants, computational models of language processing

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© 2009, University of Rochester, The College, Brain & Cognitive Sciences
Last modified: 05/28/2009
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