Psychology professor and student mentee present infancy research at an international conference in Czech Republic

Sabrina Perkins, associate professor of psychology and director of the Infant Development Lab, traveled with psychology major and student researcher Anna Grace Gilbert ’27 to attend and present infancy research at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) International Conference on Development and Learning (ICDL) in Prague, Czech Republic. 

IEEE is the world’s largest technical professional organization and is dedicated to advancing technology for the benefit of humanity. IEEE’s ICDL is a unique meeting of researchers from computer science, robotics, psychology, neuroscience and other disciplines to share and discuss research on how humans and other animals learn and develop and how this can inform and be informed by robotics and machine learning systems. The conference was held at the faculty of electrical engineering, at the Czech Technical University.

Gilbert presented a co-authored poster with Perkins and collaborator Daniela Corbetta (University of Tennessee Knoxville) titled, “Play by Play: Interacting with Targets from Crawling to Walking.” The work, which is still ongoing, uses network analyses to capture infants’ shifts from one target to another during free play sessions across the first two years of life.

Travel to the conference was supported by Elon College, the College of Arts and Sciences, the Undergraduate Research Program, and the Psychology Department. Mentored students in the Infant Development Lab come from a variety of diverse backgrounds and go on to graduate and professional programs. The Infant Development Lab focuses on understanding how infants acquire postural and locomotor skills such as sitting, reaching, crawling and walking in the first two years of life.

This research is an extension of Perkins’ research on how motor development affects infants’ interactions with their wider environments.