ABSTRACT

The South Florida Research Consortium on the Development of Attention, Perception, Learning, and Memory will apply a developmental framework to foster the integration of biological, psychological, and social levels of analysis to the understanding of selective attention, perceptual processing, learning and memory during infancy and early childhood. The consortium will integrate research across species (utilizing both animal and human subjects), across developmental stages (from prenatal through early childhood), and across levels (neural, psychobiological, psychological, and social). A primary theme of the project is a focus on making research, theory, and application more ecologically relevant to multimodal natural learning contexts. Additional themes include: addressing the nature and basis of developmental change and growth from infancy to early childhood and investigating the mechanisms of early learning and generalization.

At the catalyst stage, this project will initiate and support workshops, planning meetings, and pilot research collaborations that can address a range of content areas including: the development of object and event perception, biological bases of early learning and memory, the development of language and communicative functioning, social and emotional development, and early cognitive development. This collaborative effort will contribute to theory construction and the development of an integrated knowledge base in the science of learning that can be easily translated to applications in education. Core and affiliated faculty concentrated at three universities in South Florida that will provide a rich and diverse set of resources and a critical intellectual mass for collaborative interdisciplinary research and for creating an infrastructure necessary for a future SLC proposal.

Broader impacts that will result from this proposed activity include applying newly discovered fundamental principles of learning and development from interdisciplinary efforts to education. The consortium will promote unique opportunities for training of investigators and students through the cross-fertilization of traditionally separate domains of knowledge and expertise, thereby fostering a synergistic effect on the growth of a science of learning. Further, the project's focus on the theme of ecological validity will facilitate easy translation between theory and application of findings to naturalistic learning contexts such as the social environment or the classroom setting.

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