Richard Aslin

Looking to learn

Richard Aslin, ’75, develops new ways to understand babies’ brains

Richard Aslin started observing babies when he was a teen with three much-younger siblings. Observing the early milestones of his little brothers and sister turned him into a great candidate for a psychology major in college. At Michigan State, Aslin met and went to work for Hiram Fitzgerald, who used physiological measures, such as heart rate and skin conductance responses, to study reactions to various stimuli. That set him on the path to graduate school in Minnesota.

“There I was able to study with not one but many faculty who were leaders in the field,” he remembers. “And the graduate students were really encouraged to follow their own interests. That was unusual.”

At the Institute of Child Development, Aslin’s interests shifted from learning to perception. He completed his dissertation on binocular eye movements in infants. But he also got to expand his interests with a year-long project on language development that would prove pivotal many years later.

As a professor of brain and cognitive sciences at the University of Rochester, New York, Aslin became a pioneer in statistical learning, an area of developmental psychology that emerged in the 1990s. It’s an area that bridges the areas of perception, cognition, and learning.

Statistical learning—also called observational or implicit learning—refers to children’s ability to perceive the frequency of events in the world around them in a way that allows them to predict future events. The first study to identify it examined language learning by babies and was carried out by Jenny Saffran, a doctoral student jointly advised by Aslin and Elissa Newport. Saffran went on to become a leading researcher of infant cognition and language acquisition at the University of Wisconsin.

Aslin’s research on babies and children has shown how learning is the process of forming statistical models in the brain that allow us to accurately interpret and predict a constantly changing environment. His creativity, collaboration, teaching, and writing led to hundreds of publications, including the article with Saffran and Newport that has been cited over two thousand times.

This year, because of his leadership and the impact of his work, Aslin became one of four psychological scientists inducted into the National Academy of Sciences. Membership in the academy, formed in 1863 by President Lincoln, is one of the highest honors given to a scientist in the United States.

Looking and the brain

From birth, children show what attracts and holds their attention by looking at it. And looking is pretty simple to observe, even by untrained adults.

“It turns out we’re incredibly good at it,” says Aslin. Since researchers in the 1950s figured out that children show preferences by looking, they have been designing situations to observe shifts in attention.

Data has been captured with equipment as simple as a stopwatch and pencil. Photography and film came next (Aslin used infrared movie film for his doctoral research on babies’ vision), followed by video, then digital eye-tracking devices. To this day, looking has remained a dominant measure of infant cognition.

The problem, Aslin explains, is interpreting what a baby’s looking means. For example, is a baby looking at something longer because it’s new . . . or because it looks more like something familiar, such as a human face? And how does attention span and the speed with which children can process stimuli affect their ability to absorb new information?

Brain scans have opened new possibilities for understanding how children attend and learn. Active neurons in distinct regions of the brain experience an increase in blood flow that can be revealed by an MRI, for example, which uses a large magnet to track iron in the blood. But an MRI is far from ideal for studying babies.

Near Infrared Spectroscopy (NIRS) uses an infrared light beam that passes through the scalp and skull at an intensity that can’t damage the brain tissue, but reveals how that tissue is using oxygen in the blood.

“An MRI machine costs $2 million, is noisy and claustrophobic, and you have to hold still, which isn’t practical for babies,” says Aslin. “The NIRS equipment is $200,000 with no acoustic noise, so it’s great for tasks that involve speech and language, and you don’t have to hold still.”

For the past year, Aslin has been on sabbatical at MIT in Boston working to develop NIRS as a methodology for research on infant cognition. He and his team are designing tasks for babies that combine eye tracking with the new brain scan system.

“Now we’re able to observe both looking behavior and brain activity at the same time,” he says. “This will clarify how the brain controls attention and enables learning.”

This year, Aslin is being honored with the University’s Outstanding Achievement Award for distinction and leadership. His name will be added to the Wall of Honor outside the McNamara Alumni Center.

Read more about Richard Aslin and his work.

Learn more about the Institute of Child Development.

Story by Gayla Marty | Photo by K. C. Cohen | June 2014