Richard Aslin, PhD

“These kinds of experiments that use eye trackers and other sophisticated devices to measure infants’ behavior strongly suggest that they have capabilities well beyond what we thought they had.”

Richard Aslin is a Senior Scientist at Haskins Laboratories. Until December 2016, he was William R. Kenan Professor of Brain & Cognitive Sciences and Center for Visual Sciences at the University of Rochester. During his time in Rochester, he was also Director of the Rochester Center for Brain Imaging and the Rochester Baby Lab.

Aslin studies infant perception and language development using eye tracking and neuroimaging 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. Since then, Aslin’s research has moved toward studies of brain function in adults and infants using fMRI, fNIRS, and EEG.

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. He also received numerous early career development awards, including ones from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the National Institute of Mental Health, the American Psychological Association, and the National Science Foundation. He was named a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Aslin’s research has been supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, the Office of Naval Research, the McDonnell Foundation, and the Packard Foundation.

Aslin received his Ph.D in Child Psychology from the University of Minnesota in 1975 at the Institute of Child Development.