FEATURED SPEAKER

Karen E. Adolph, Ph.D.

Karen E. Adolph, Ph.D., is Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at New York University. She leads the Databrary.org project to enable open sharing and reuse of research video, the PLAY (Play and Learning Across a Year) project, and she created and maintains the Datavyu.org video-coding tool. Adolph received a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and Ph.D. from Emory University, and completed a 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 for “worldwide outstanding work on infants’ perception/action development,” a Cattell Sabbatical Award, the APF Fantz Memorial Award, the APA Boyd McCandless Award, the 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 Developmental Psychobiology and Motor Learning and Development. Adolph has published over 155 peer-reviewed articles and chapters. Her research on perceptual-motor learning and development has been continually funded by NIH and NSF since 1991. 

THURSDAY PRECONFERENCE

Understanding, Capturing, and Quantifying Functional Motor Behavior

Karen E. Adolph, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience,
New York University 

This full-day pre-conference course is designed for clinicians, researchers, and students concerned with understanding and promoting functional motor behavior. The material is accessible to participants at all levels of instruction. Effective clinical practice requires insights into the nature of functional motor behavior in the natural everyday environment, but this knowledge has proven elusive for clinicians and researchers. This course will: (1) provide a conceptual framework for understanding motor behavior as part of a changing, developing system; (2) illustrate the power of video—alone and in combination with other technologies—to capture the richness and complexity of behavior and the critical details of the surrounding context; and (3) describe tools for annotating video to quantify changes in behavior in real time and over development. Although the examples focus primarily on typically developing infants and children, the material is relevant for healthy and clinical populations across the lifespan. Overall, this course will benefit participants by expanding their ability to understand, capture, and quantify functional motor behavior.

FRIDAY KEYNOTE

Motor Development: Embodied, Embedded, Enculturated, and Enabling

Karen E. Adolph, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience,
New York University 

This presentation on perceptual-motor skill acquisition in typically developing infants and children is relevant to any clinician, researcher, or student concerned with under-standing and promoting functional motor behavior. The material is accessible to attendees at all levels of instruction. A major challenge for therapists is to under-stand and facilitate the learning and re-learning of func-tional perceptual-motor skills. Although therapy is typically geared to isolated domains of motor skill, this presentation will show that perceptual-motor skill acquisition must encompass the whole child in the everyday physical and social environment. I will present four key features of perceptual-motor skill acquisition. (1) Skill acquisition is embodied: Opportunities for motor action depend on the current status of the body. (2) Skill acquisition is embedded: Variations in the environment create and constrain possibilities for motor action. (3) Skill acquisition is enculturated: Social and cultural influences shape motor behaviors. (4) Skill acquisition is enabling: New motor skills create new opportunities for exploration and learning that instigate cascades of developments across diverse psychological domains. For each key feature, I will show that changes in children’s bodies, environments, and experiences entail behavioral flexibility, and thus are essential to interventions designed to facilitate functional, adaptive motor behavior. Overall, this course will benefit attendees by broadening and enriching their under-standing of perceptual-motor skill acquisition.

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