Welcome to Dr. Dare Baldwin's research lab at the University of Oregon!
Among the skills we routinely take for granted is the ability to make sense of others' action. Just imagine, however, what it would be like if this ability were suddenly snatched from us. That is, imagine you could still see other's behavior, but not penetrate the meaning of that behavior.
You would see a flurry of motion, with bodies moving hither and thither, arms and hands snaking in and out, and intermittent, rapidly changing contact with a diverse range of objects. You might struggle to remember all the surface details of this complex motion display, with little hope of success given the sheer volume of motion information coming your way in the course of a single hour of a single day. And all of this effort would yield little benefit: just registering motion patterns wouldn't help in making sense of other forms of complex behavior, such as language. This may be a roughly accurate description of the challenge that individuals with profound autism face, and highlights how much we all (largely unconsciously) depend on skills for rapid redescription of action in meaningful terms in our everyday social and cognitive functioning.
Once we acknowledge the complexity of human action, and the fact that the goal of action processing is to achieve a meaningful redescription, it becomes clear that action processing must be accomplished by a powerful and multi-faceted perceptual/cognitive system. Surprisingly, this is a system about which relatively little is known. What are its components, how do they interact, what neurophysiological systems are involved in supporting these components, how is this system acquired in normal human development, and what kinds of deficits arise when components are disrupted?
The Baldwin lab studies a variety of topics related to the development of social understanding, language development, and the interface between these two domains. Recent projects have focused on questions such as:
* As observers of dynamic human action, how do we identify individual acts within the continuous stream of ongoing motion?
* How do infants break into organized processing of dynamic human action?
* What are sources of delays and/or deficits in language and social understanding in children with autism?
* How do developments in social understanding expedite language learning?
Two themes stand out in our findings thus far: action processing is surprisingly sophistocated even in infancy, and mechanisms that support the acquisition of skills for action processing seem closely related to those supporting language acquisition. This points to the possibility that general-purpose learning mechanisms are key in the epigenesis of both language and action processing.
Baldwin Lab