Prof. Paul Quinn elected APA fellow

Paul Quinn, professor of psychology, gauges the reactions of infant Christopher to various images, while Christopher’s mother, Sue, observes.

4:27 p.m., Sept. 23, 2004--Paul Quinn, professor of psychology, has been elected a fellow of the American Psychological Association (APA), one of the top honors in the field, for his research involving infant visual perception and how young babies mentally represent the objects they see.

APA cited Quinn for his “outstanding contribution to the field of psychology” and his “diligent work and commitment,” which earned him the special recognition from his peers.

“This is a real tribute to Paul’s research career,” Thomas DiLorenzo, chairperson of the Department of Psychology, said. “It brings great honor to Paul, the department, and the University.”

Quinn first became interested in infant cognitive development while a graduate student at Brown University, where he received his bachelor’s and doctoral degrees. After teaching at the University of Iowa and Washington and Jefferson College, he came to UD in 2003 when an opportunity opened to build an infant research laboratory in cognitive development here.

“Much research has been done on babies’ sensory abilities like visual acuity, but not as much has been devoted to understanding how infants parse what they see into meaningful categories. Determining what infants know about the world is an empirical challenge because babies can’t express themselves verbally,” Quinn said.

“The objective of the studies is to learn about how infants organize their perceptual experiences in ways that will facilitate subsequent intellectual development.” Quinn said.

Quinn, whose research is funded by two different grants from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, has a laboratory in Wolf Hall coordinated by Laurie Yarzab.

Working with babies that are 3 to 10 months of age, Quinn assesses them at various developmental levels and gauges their reactions to a variety of visual stimuli. His research focuses on how babies group parts into whole objects, how they group multiple objects into categories, and how they parse physical space into concepts defined by the spatial relations among objects (e.g., above, below, left, right, between, outside).

“We send letters to parents of new babies explaining our project and invite the parents and baby to participate.” Quinn said.

The babies are shown images and their behavior is observed and recorded, such as how long the babies focus on each picture, how long before they lose interest, and their reaction to novel pictures. “We have learned that when something new is introduced, babies react by focusing on it for a longer time,” Quinn said.

“For example, we may show a baby a series of cat pictures with the cats shown in different breeds and stances. Then, we show the baby a picture of a new cat paired with a picture of a dog and observe the visual reaction. By judging which stimulus is superimposed over the baby’s pupils, we know which one he or she is focusing on. From this procedure, we have learned that babies can recognize what is common to the familiar category and what is different about the novel category,” Quinn said.

Other displays show abstract symbols, such as dark and light blocks, in different row versus column formations. These are designed to investigate babies’ abilities to group parts into organized wholes, in this case, based on the similarity in lightness of the parts.

Laurie Yarzab (left), coordinator of Quinn’s lab, monitors the progress of observations with student researchers (from left) senior Becky Rausa, junior Megan O’Connor and senior Courtney Todd.

Christopher, one of the study participants, was monitored by Quinn, Yarzab and three student researchers, junior Megan O’Connor and seniors Becky Rausa and Courtney Todd. A cooperative and cheerful three-month-old baby, Christopher sat on his mother’s lap on a chair in back of a box-like apparatus.

A student researcher placed a series of pictures on a display stage, which was then closed so that Christopher would focus on the pictures. He was then observed through a peephole and also on video monitors, with his reactions timed by stopwatches.

At the end of the session, Christopher’s visual acuity was examined by showing him cards with alternating black and white stripes, which decreased in size until he could not see them any more and lost interest. This procedure provides an estimate of how well he could see, based on the norms for the age level.

At the conclusion of the visit, Christopher was presented with a certificate of appreciation and a small monetary honorarium for his participation.

As Quinn points out in his letter to parents, the focus at this juncture is not on individual differences in performance, but rather how a whole group of babies performs. “The long-range benefit,” Quinn wrote, “is that if your baby helps us to understand what the average baby can do, some day we might be able to develop tests to identify those infants who are at risk for developing perceptual and memory problems.”

Quinn is associate editor of Child Development and also Developmental Science and serves on the editorial boards of several other psychology journals. He also is a member of the Center for Scientific Review of the National Institutes of Health in the area of cognition and perception. Quinn was a lecturer on computational modeling of cognitive processes at Oxford University during the summer of 1998 and a research scientist at the Cognitive Development Unit of the Medical Research Council in London in 1995-96.

Article by Sue Moncure
Photos by Kathy Atkinson

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