Karen Adolph Receives NIH MERIT Award to Continue Work on Motor Skill Acquisition in Infants

By James Devitt

For the past 15 years, Karen Adolph, a professor in NYU’s Departments of Psychology and Neural Science, has been studying how infants acquire motor skills in order to understand more general processes of learning and development.

Her focus has been on the development of behavioral flexibility—how infants learn to adapt their actions to novel and variable situations. In her Infant Action Laboratory, Adolph and her colleagues challenge infants with new predicaments, such as reaching through apertures and over gaps, crawling up and down slopes, and walking in platform or Teflon-soled shoes to observe how they decide whether an action is safe or risky, possible or impossible.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has now recognized the import and potential of Adolph’s work by awarding her a MERIT Award. MERIT is an acronym for “Method to Extend Research in Time,” and recipients are given awards lasting eight to 10 years (NIH grants typically last three to five years). Fewer than 5 percent of NIH grants are MERIT awards, and they are meant to recognize excellence in research over an extended period of time.

“MERIT awards are rare,” says Daniel Stein, NYU’s dean for science. “They reflect NIH’s great confidence in the recipient, and implicitly acknowledge that his/her work and creativity are of sufficiently high caliber that they should not be hampered by the demands of writing a competitive renewal. As such, they recognize significant accomplishment and the expectation of even better things to come.”

Adolph, whose most recent research explores how infants navigate through apertures by crawling and walking, notes that her scholarship crosses several domains of psychology—motor, perceptual, cognitive, and social development—in order to better understand the mechanisms that underlie learning and development. She and her colleagues are also comparing infants’ and adults’ abilities to adapt to changes in their body dimensions (e.g., women during pregnancy and infants wearing body packs) using head-mounted eye-trackers and various motion recording devices.

“The study of flexibility in infants is especially revealing because learning takes place within the larger context of developmental change,” Adolph explains. “Over their first two years of life, infants’ bodies, skills, and environments change rapidly and dramatically. The real question in motor skill acquisition is how infants learn to cope with a changeable body in a variable world.”