Psychology Faculty Member Receives NSF Early Career Award

March 27, 2001

University Park, Pa. --- Rick O. Gilmore, assistant professor of psychology in Penn State’s College of the Liberal Arts, is the recipient of a National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development Award for research in spatial perception in early infancy.

The CAREER program is designed to help scientists and engineers develop their research and teaching, and is NSF's most prestigious award for junior faculty.

Gilmore is principal investigator on the five-year project, which was awarded $394,070. He is head of the Brain Development Laboratory in the Department of Psychology in the college.

He will examine how spatial perception and action planning develop in early infancy and what factors influence their development. He will study how infants develop the ability to perceive where their bodies are located in space and which way they are moving. This information is crucial for maintaining balance, crawling, and walking.

The research will provide information that does not currently exist about how these abilities are related to changes in vision that occur early in life. In addition, the educational activities in the research project will provide Penn State students with the latest methods for planning and carrying out research in developmental cognitive neuroscience, the field that studies how the mind and brain develop.

Gilmore wrote several articles and book chapters, and his book, "Brain Development and Cognition: A Reader," second edition, with M. H. Johnson and Y. Munakata, is forthcoming. He received his B.A. in cognitive science from Brown University and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in psychology from Carnegie Mellon University.

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