Daphne Maurer | |
---|---|
Citizenship | Canadian |
Occupation | Professor of Psychology |
Spouse | Charles Maurer |
Awards | Donald O. Hebb Distinguished Contribution Award (2015) |
Academic background | |
Alma mater | University of Minnesota |
Doctoral advisor | Philip Salapatek |
Academic work | |
Institutions | McMaster University |
Daphne Maurer OC FRSC is a Canadian developmental psychologist and professor emeritus in the Department of Psychology,Neuroscience &Behaviour at McMaster University. [1] She is known for her work on the development of visual perception in humans,starting in infancy. [2] [3]
Maurer received a B.A. with honours at Swarthmore College,an M.A. in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania,and a PhD in child development at the University of Minnesota. [4]
Maurer's Visual Development Lab at McMaster University focuses on understanding the development of visual perception and,to a lesser extent,on understanding synaesthesia. She has published more than 200 papers in scientific journals,including Nature,Science and Nature Neuroscience. [5] "Her work has reshaped our understanding of the infant's sensory world and its development," according to the citation for the Hebb award. [6]
Maurer's research has mostly been basic science but it has had practical import:it has informed the treatment of congenital cataract and it has shown that some kinds of video game can ameliorate adult amblyopia. [7]
Maurer has also studied the methods,utility,and practicality of screening the vision of kindergarteners throughout the province of Ontario. (Studies of other jurisdictions are not directly applicable because of different medical systems,ethnicity,and geography.) Her research led the Province to begin universal vision screening in senior kindergarten,beginning in the school year 2018–2019. [8]
In 1988,Maurer published with her husband,Charles Maurer,The World of the Newborn,a science book that examines the development of the newborn baby from the baby's perspective. [9] [10] [3] A review published in the Journal of Pediatric Psychology called it "a landmark book;it is among those rare titles that successfully offer a startlingly fresh perspective on their subject matter." [11] "It leads the authors into complex and tantalizing constructions of the baby's sensorium," wrote The New York Times. [9] The World of the Newborn won the book award of the American Psychological Association and was translated into five languages. [4]
In 2019,she and her husband published Pretty Ugly:Why we like some songs,faces,foods,plays,pictures,poems,etc.,and dislike others. This combines rigorous science with a cross-cultural history of all the arts to show why and how people (and some animals) develop esthetic preferences. [12]
Maurer has commented on child development,vision and synaesthesia for many media outlets including The New York Times and New Scientist . [13] [14] She also has a long interest in research ethics and sat for seven years on Canada's national Interagency Advisory Panel on Research Ethics.
Maurer is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada,of the Association for Psychological Science,and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2015 she was awarded the Donald O. Hebb Distinguished Contribution Award from the Canadian Society for Brain,Behaviour and Cognitive Science. In 2011 McMaster awarded her the title Distinguished University Professor,then in 2017 awarded her an honorary degree. [2]
In 2024 she was appointed an Officer of the Order of Canada. [15]
Donald Olding Hebb was a Canadian psychologist who was influential in the area of neuropsychology,where he sought to understand how the function of neurons contributed to psychological processes such as learning. He is best known for his theory of Hebbian learning,which he introduced in his classic 1949 work The Organization of Behavior. He has been described as the father of neuropsychology and neural networks. A Review of General Psychology survey,published in 2002,ranked Hebb as the 19th most cited psychologist of the 20th century. His views on learning described behavior and thought in terms of brain function,explaining cognitive processes in terms of connections between neuron assemblies.
Amblyopia,also called lazy eye,is a disorder of sight in which the brain fails to fully process input from one eye and over time favors the other eye. It results in decreased vision in an eye that typically appears normal in other aspects. Amblyopia is the most common cause of decreased vision in a single eye among children and younger adults.
Infant vision concerns the development of visual ability in human infants from birth through the first years of life. The aspects of human vision which develop following birth include visual acuity,tracking,color perception,depth perception,and object recognition.
Adele Dorothy Diamond is a professor of neuroscience at the University of British Columbia,where she is currently a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience. One of the pioneers in the field of developmental cognitive neuroscience,Diamond researches how executive functions are affected by biological and environmental factors,especially in children. Her discoveries have improved treatment for disorders such as phenylketonuria and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder,and they have impacted early education.
Perceptual narrowing is a developmental process during which the brain uses environmental experiences to shape perceptual abilities. This process improves the perception of things that people experience often and causes them to experience a decline in the ability to perceive some things to which they are not often exposed. This phenomenon is a result of neuroplasticity,including Hebbian learning and synaptic pruning. Through these mechanisms,neural pathways that are more consistently used are strengthened,making them more efficient,while those pathways that are unused become less efficient. This process is most evident during sensitive periods of development. The prevailing theory is that human infants are born with the ability to sense a wide variety of stimuli,and as they age,they begin to selectively narrow these perceptions by categorizing them in a more socio-culturally relevant way. Most of the research in this area focuses on facial discrimination and phoneme distinction in human infants. However,other work has found that perceptual narrowing also occurs for music and sign language perception. Perceptual narrowing has also been implicated in synaesthesia.
Andrew N. Meltzoff is an American psychologist and an internationally recognized expert on infant and child development. His discoveries about infant imitation greatly advanced the scientific understanding of early cognition,personality and brain development.
Infant cognitive development is the first stage of human cognitive development,in the youngest children. The academic field of infant cognitive development studies of how psychological processes involved in thinking and knowing develop in young children. Information is acquired in a number of ways including through sight,sound,touch,taste,smell and language,all of which require processing by our cognitive system. However,cognition begins through social bonds between children and caregivers,which gradually increase through the essential motive force of Shared intentionality. The notion of Shared intentionality describes unaware processes during social learning at the onset of life when organisms in the simple reflexes substage of the sensorimotor stage of cognitive development do not maintain communication via the sensory system.
Laura-Ann Petitto is a cognitive neuroscientist and a developmental cognitive neuroscientist known for her research and scientific discoveries involving the language capacity of chimpanzees,the biological bases of language in humans,especially early language acquisition,early reading,and bilingualism,bilingual reading,and the bilingual brain. Significant scientific discoveries include the existence of linguistic babbling on the hands of deaf babies and the equivalent neural processing of signed and spoken languages in the human brain. She is recognized for her contributions to the creation of the new scientific discipline,called educational neuroscience. Petitto chaired a new undergraduate department at Dartmouth College,called "Educational Neuroscience and Human Development" (2002-2007),and was a Co-Principal Investigator in the National Science Foundation and Dartmouth's Science of Learning Center,called the "Center for Cognitive and Educational Neuroscience" (2004-2007). At Gallaudet University (2011–present),Petitto led a team in the creation of the first PhD in Educational Neuroscience program in the United States. Petitto is the Co-Principal Investigator as well as Science Director of the National Science Foundation and Gallaudet University’s Science of Learning Center,called the "Visual Language and Visual Learning Center (VL2)". Petitto is also founder and Scientific Director of the Brain and Language Laboratory for Neuroimaging (“BL2”) at Gallaudet University.
The bouba/kiki effect,or kiki/bouba effect,is a non-arbitrary mental association between certain speech sounds and certain visual shapes. Most narrowly,it is the tendency for people,when presented with the nonsense words bouba and kiki,to associate bouba with a rounded shape and kiki with a spiky shape. Its discovery dates back to the 1920s,when psychologists documented experimental participants as connecting nonsense words to shapes in consistent ways. There is a strong general tendency towards the effect worldwide;it has been robustly confirmed across a majority of cultures and languages in which it has been researched,for example including among English-speaking American university students,Tamil speakers in India,speakers of certain languages with no writing system,young children,infants,and the congenitally blind. It has also been shown to occur with familiar names. The effect was investigated using fMRI in 2018. The bouba/kiki effect is one form of sound symbolism.
Synesthesia or synaesthesia is a perceptual phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. For instance,people with synesthesia may experience colors when listening to music,see shapes when smelling certain scents,or perceive tastes when looking at words. People who report a lifelong history of such experiences are known as synesthetes. Awareness of synesthetic perceptions varies from person to person with the perception of synesthesia differing based on an individual's unique life experiences and the specific type of synesthesia that they have. In one common form of synesthesia,known as grapheme–color synesthesia or color–graphemic synesthesia,letters or numbers are perceived as inherently colored. In spatial-sequence,or number form synesthesia,numbers,months of the year,or days of the week elicit precise locations in space,or may appear as a three-dimensional map. Synesthetic associations can occur in any combination and any number of senses or cognitive pathways.
Susan R. Barry is a Professor Emeritus of Biological Sciences and Professor Emeritus of Neuroscience and Behavior at Mount Holyoke College and the author of three books. She was dubbed Stereo Sue by neurologist and author Oliver Sacks in a 2006 New Yorker article with that name.
Melvyn Alan Goodale FRSC,FRS is a Canadian neuroscientist. He was the founding Director of the Brain and Mind Institute at the University of Western Ontario where he holds the Canada Research Chair in Visual Neuroscience. He holds appointments in the Departments of Psychology,Physiology &Pharmacology,and Ophthalmology at Western. Goodale's research focuses on the neural substrates of visual perception and visuomotor control.
Martin Jeffrey Steinbach was an American vision researcher who spent most of his career in Canada. He was Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus in the Department of Psychology at York University. He received a master's degree from Connecticut College in 1965 and a Ph.D. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1968.
Davida Young Teller was a professor in the Departments of Psychology and Physiology/Biophysics at the University of Washington,Seattle,Washington. She was a leader in the scientific study of infant visual development.
Sandra Trehub was a Canadian psychologist recognized for her research in the field of music psychology. She held the position of Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto.
Rachel Keen is a developmental psychologist known for her research on infant cognitive development,auditory development,and motor control. She is Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Virginia.
Daphne Blunt Bugental was a psychologist known for her research on parent-child relationships,infant and child maltreatment,and family violence. At the time of her death,she was professor emerita of Psychology at the University of California,Santa Barbara.
The CPA Donald O. Hebb Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychology as a Science is an annual award presented by the Canadian Psychological Association (CPA).
Beatriz Luna is a developmental neuroscientist known for conducting neuroimaging research on the development of cognitive control,reward,and reinforcement learning from early childhood to adolescence.
Ruxandra Sireteanu,also known after her marriage as Ruxandra Sireteanu-Constantinescu,was a Romanian biophysicist and neuroscientist who undertook pioneering research into the human visual system. Born in Romania,she initially studied at the University of Bucharest. She then undertook research in Pisa in Italy and Lausanne in Switzerland before moving to Germany,first joining the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich to work with Wolf Singer,and then the University of Ulm. In 1978,she moved to Frankfurt,initially to join the local Max Planck Institute for Brain Research before inaugurating the chair in Biological Psychology at Goethe University,which she held from 1999. She also held visiting positions at universities in the United States,including the University of California,Berkeley. Her research centred on the way that the visual system developed in people from their birth into adulthood,for which she studied both healthy individuals and,particularly,those with disorders like amblyopia.