Richard N. Aslin (born August 9, 1949) is an American

psychologist A psychologist is a professional who practices psychology and studies mental states, perceptual, cognitive, emotional, and social processes and behavior. Their work often involves the experimentation, observation, and interpretation of how indi ...

. He is currently a Senior Scientist at

Haskins Laboratories Haskins Laboratories, Inc. is an independent 501(c) non-profit corporation, founded in 1935 and located in New Haven, Connecticut, since 1970. Haskins has formal affiliation agreements with both Yale University and the University of Connecticut; ...

. Until December, 2016, Dr. Aslin was William R. Kenan

Professor Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an Academy, academic rank at university, universities and other post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin as a "person who pr ...

Brain A brain is an organ that serves as the center of the nervous system in all vertebrate and most invertebrate animals. It is located in the head, usually close to the sensory organs for senses such as vision. It is the most complex organ in a v ...

& Cognitive Sciences and Center for Visual Sciences at the

University of Rochester The University of Rochester (U of R, UR, or U of Rochester) is a private research university in Rochester, New York. The university grants undergraduate and graduate degrees, including doctoral and professional degrees. The University of Roc ...

. During his time in Rochester, he was also Director of the Rochester Center for Brain Imaging and the Rochester Baby Lab. He had worked at the university for over thirty years, until he resigned in protest of the university's handling of a sexual harassment complaint about a junior member of his department. His research covers many areas, but the bulk of it concerns statistical learning,

visual perception Visual perception is the ability to interpret the surrounding environment through photopic vision (daytime vision), color vision, scotopic vision (night vision), and mesopic vision (twilight vision), using light in the visible spectrum reflecte ...

speech perception Speech perception is the process by which the sounds of language Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by wh ...

language development Language development in humans is a process starting early in life. Infants start without knowing a language, yet by 10 months, babies can distinguish speech sounds and engage in babbling. Some research has shown that the earliest learning begin ...

, and visual development. A great deal of his work focuses on understanding how higher-level cognitive representations and structures are constructed from lower-level sensory input statistics, including how acoustic variation in speech to infants yields phonologically distinct speech sound categories in adults.

Biography

Born in

Milwaukee Milwaukee ( ), officially the City of Milwaukee, is both the most populous and most densely populated city in the U.S. state of Wisconsin and the county seat of Milwaukee County. With a population of 577,222 at the 2020 census, Milwaukee is ...

Wisconsin Wisconsin () is a state in the upper Midwestern United States. Wisconsin is the 25th-largest state by total area and the 20th-most populous. It is bordered by Minnesota to the west, Iowa to the southwest, Illinois to the south, Lake M ...

, he graduated from

Michigan State University Michigan State University (Michigan State, MSU) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in East Lansing, Michigan. It was founded in 1855 as the Agricultural College of the State of Michigan, the fi ...

with a Bachelor of Arts with High Honors in Psychology, in 1971. Aslin received his

Ph.D A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common Academic degree, degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields ...

in Child Psychology from the

University of Minnesota The University of Minnesota, formally the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, (UMN Twin Cities, the U of M, or Minnesota) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul, Tw ...

in 1975 at the Institute of Child Development. His advisor was Philip Salapatek. He was a faculty member in the Department of Psychology at the

Indiana University Indiana University (IU) is a system of public universities in the U.S. state of Indiana. Campuses Indiana University has two core campuses, five regional campuses, and two regional centers under the administration of IUPUI. *Indiana Universit ...

and a visiting researcher at the

University of Washington The University of Washington (UW, simply Washington, or informally U-Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington. Founded in 1861, Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast; it was established in Seattle a ...

and the

before joining the faculty at the

. He is also the current President of the International Society for Infant Studies. In 2017, Aslin and eight other plaintiffs filed a federal lawsuit against the

for its handling of a sexual misconduct complaint. In 2020, the university settled the case for $9.4 million without any admission of wrongdoing, but issued a statement thanking the plaintiffs for their efforts. He has a wife and two sons. His son Tim is an actor.

Research interests

Aslin studies infant perception and language development using

eye tracking Eye tracking is the process of measuring either the point of gaze (where one is looking) or the motion of an eye relative to the head. An eye tracker is a device for measuring eye positions and eye movement. Eye trackers are used in research ...

and

neuroimaging Neuroimaging is the use of quantitative (computational) techniques to study the structure and function of the central nervous system, developed as an objective way of scientifically studying the healthy human brain in a non-invasive manner. Incre ...

methods. Some of his early work concerned how infants learn the speech categories of their native language based on the noisy input of speech around them. He also studied how this process of forming speech categories interacts with word learning in young pre-verbal infants. Later work, with collaborators

Jenny Saffran Jenny Saffran is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She specializes in language acquisition and early cognitive development, and she also conducts research on music cognition. Saffran views language acquisition as ...

and

Elissa L. Newport Elissa Lee Newport is a Professor of Neurology and Director of the Center for Brain Plasticity and Recovery at Georgetown University. She specializes in language acquisition and developmental psycholinguistics, focusing on the relationship bet ...

addressed how infants segment words from continuous speech by tracking the co-occurrence statistics of the syllables. This research yielded many publications that are considered classics in the statistical learning literature, including a 1996

Science Science is a systematic endeavor that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe. Science may be as old as the human species, and some of the earliest archeological evidence for ...

article, "Statistical Learning in 8-Month-Old Infants". Some of his recent work has extended original findings about infants' ability to track environmental statistics in speech to the visual world. Recently he has studied how infants use statistics of the visual world in order to infer properties about the structure of objects in the world. He has also recently conducted research investigating how infants allocate their attention in the visual world. He has collaborated on studies of adults' spoken word recognition,

, and word learning with Michael Tanenhaus.

Recognition

Aslin has been recognized by a number of organizations for the impact of his theoretical and empirical contributions to the fields of cognitive science and

developmental psychology Developmental psychology is the science, scientific study of how and why humans grow, change, and adapt across the course of their lives. Originally concerned with infants and children, the field has expanded to include adolescence, adult deve ...

. He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate at

Uppsala University Uppsala University ( sv, Uppsala universitet) is a public university, public research university in Uppsala, Sweden. Founded in 1477, it is the List of universities in Sweden, oldest university in Sweden and the Nordic countries still in opera ...

in 2010, the Robert and Pamela Goergen Award for Distinguished Contributions to Undergraduate Learning in 2001, and a

Guggenheim Fellowship Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...

in 1988. He also received numerous early career development awards, including ones from the

National Institute of Child Health and Human Development The ''Eunice Kennedy Shriver'' National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) is one of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in the United States Department of Health and Human Services. It supports and conducts research aime ...

, the

National Institute of Mental Health The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) is one of 27 institutes and centers that make up the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The NIH, in turn, is an agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services and is the prima ...

, the

American Psychological Association The American Psychological Association (APA) is the largest scientific and professional organization of psychologists in the United States, with over 133,000 members, including scientists, educators, clinicians, consultants, and students. It ha ...

, and the

National Science Foundation The National Science Foundation (NSF) is an independent agency of the United States government that supports fundamental research and education in all the non-medical fields of science and engineering. Its medical counterpart is the National I ...

. He was named a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences at

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

and the

American Association for the Advancement of Science The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is an American international non-profit organization with the stated goals of promoting cooperation among scientists, defending scientific freedom, encouraging scientific respons ...

. In 2006, he was elected a Fellow of the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, and ...

, and in 2014, he was inducted into the

National Academy of Sciences The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) is a United States nonprofit, non-governmental organization. NAS is part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Nati ...

For 2022, Aslin was awarded the

Dickson Prize The Dickson Prize in Medicine and the Dickson Prize in Science were both established in 1969 by Joseph Z. Dickson and Agnes Fischer Dickson. Dickson Prize in Medicine The Dickson Prize in Medicine is awarded annually by the University of Pittsburg ...

from

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...

. Aslin's research has been supported by

grants Grant or Grants may refer to: Places *Grant County (disambiguation) Australia * Grant, Queensland, a locality in the Barcaldine Region, Queensland, Australia United Kingdom *Castle Grant United States * Grant, Alabama *Grant, Inyo County, C ...

from the

National Institutes of Health The National Institutes of Health, commonly referred to as NIH (with each letter pronounced individually), is the primary agency of the United States government responsible for biomedical and public health research. It was founded in the late ...

, the

Office of Naval Research The Office of Naval Research (ONR) is an organization within the United States Department of the Navy responsible for the science and technology programs of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps. Established by Congress in 1946, its mission is to plan ...

, the McDonnell Foundation, and the

Packard Foundation The David and Lucile Packard Foundation is a private foundation that provides grants to not-for-profit organizations. It was created in 1964 by David Packard (co-founder of HP) and his wife Lucile Salter Packard. Following David Packard's death ...

References

External links

Richard Aslin's profile pageRochester Baby Lab
{{DEFAULTSORT:Aslin, Richard N. 1949 births Living people Scientists from Milwaukee Scientists from Rochester, New York 21st-century American psychologists Developmental psycholinguists Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Michigan State University alumni University of Minnesota alumni Indiana University faculty University of Rochester faculty Fellows of the Cognitive Science Society 20th-century American psychologists