Dr Andy Bremner BA DPhil
Position held:
Senior Lecturer
Phone:
+44 (0)20 7078 5142
Fax:
+44 (0)20 7919 7873
Email:
a.bremner (@gold.ac.uk)
Room 1-18, Ben Pimlott Building,
Department of Psychology
Goldsmiths, University of London,
New Cross, London, SE14 6NW
The development of: object knowledge, spatial representation, body representation, multisensory perception, learning and cognitive control, in infancy and early childhood.
Grants & awards
Research interests
My broad research area is in perceptual and cognitive development in infancy and early childhood. The specific research questions that I am addressing fall into two groups:
Spatial representations of the environment, objects and the body in infancy and early childhood
I am particularly interested in the development of the ability to represent spatial relationships within external frames of reference (objects in the environment), and also within intrinsic frames of reference such as the body (locating the body and limbs). The first of these issues has been a substantial focus of cognitive developmental research since Piaget's seminal observations in the 1930s, and I have addressed questions concerning infants' and young children's ability to represent the layout of objects across reorientation, and also the ability to represent and locate hidden objects once out of sight. On the other hand, the development of the ability to locate stimuli with respect to intrinsic frames of reference (e.g. the location of the limbs and stimuli impinging on the body) has been relatively neglected. I and my colleagues have recently tackled this by examining young infants' ability to locate tactile stimuli applied to the hands, across familiar and unfamiliar postures of the arms (in uncrossed-hands, and crossed-hands postures).
The development of memory and cognitive control
The behavioural measures typically used to assess cognitive competence in early life (e.g. those based on looking behaviour) are often very different from those employed with adults (e.g. verbal report), making it difficult to directly compare infants' and young children's cognitive abilities. One strand of my research has been to determine whether manipulations of the circumstances in which information is gained from the environment can effect learning in different ways across development. In particular, I and my colleagues, have investigated the effect of incidental presentation of material on young children's subsequent ability to control their expression of learned material. We have recently found that 2-year-old children show surprising levels of cognitive control under these learning conditions.
Selected publications
Bremner, Andrew J., Holmes, Nicholas P and Spence, Charles. 2011. Development of multisensory representations of the body and peripersonal space. In: Andrew J. Bremner, David J. Lewkowicz and Charles Spence, eds. Multisensory Development. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Book Section]
Hill, Elisabeth L., Crane, Laura and Bremner, Andrew J.. 2011. Developmental disorders and multisensory perception. In: Andrew J. Bremner, David J. Lewkowicz and Charles Spence, eds. Multisensory Development. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Book Section]
Bremner, Andrew J., Lewkowicz, David J. and Spence, Charles, eds. 2011. Multisensory Development. Oxford University Press: Oxford. [Edited Book]
Fockert, Jan W. de and Bremner, Andrew J.. 2011. Release of Inattentional Blindness by High Working Memory Load: Elucidating the Relationship between Working Memory and Selective Attention. Cognition, [Article] (Forthcoming)
Chamorro-Premuzic, Tomas, Arteche, Adriane, Bremner, Andrew J., Greven, Corina and Furnham, Adrian. 2010. Soft skills in higher education: importance and improvement ratings as a function of individual differences and academic performance. Educational Psychology, 30(2), pp. 221-241. ISSN 0144-3410 [Article]
Mareschal, Denis and Bremner, Andrew J.. 2009. Modeling the origins of object knowledge. In: UNSPECIFIED, ed. The origins of knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 227-262. ISBN 978-0-19-921689-5 [Book Section]
Passer, Michael, Smith, Ronald, Holt, Nigel, Bremner, Andrew J., Sutherland, Ed and Vliek, Michael. 2008. Psychology: the science of mind and behaviour. Maidenhead: McGraw Hill. ISBN 9780077118365 [Book]
Bremner, Andrew J., Holmes, Nicholas P and Spence, Charles. 2008. Infants lost in (peripersonal) space? Trends in cognitive sciences, 12(8), pp. 298-305. ISSN 1364-6613 [Article]
Bremner, Andrew J., Mareschal, Denis, Lloyd-Fox, Sarah and Spence, Charles. 2008. Spatial localization of touch in the first year of life: Early influence of a visual spatial code and the development of remapping across changes in limb position. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 137(1), pp. 149-162. ISSN 0096-3445 [Article]
Bremner, Andrew J. and Spence, Charles. 2008. Unimodal experience constrains while multisensory experiences enrich cognitive construction. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 31(3), pp. 335-336. ISSN 0140-525X [Article]
Bremner, Andrew J., Mareschal, Denis, Destrebecqz, Arnaud and Cleeremans, Axel. 2007. Cognitive control of sequential knowledge in 2-year-olds: evidence from an incidental sequence-learning and generation-task. Psychological Science, 18(3), pp. 261-266. ISSN 0956-7976 [Article] (Forthcoming)
Bremner, Andrew J., Bryant, P.E., Mareschal, Denis and Volein, A.. 2007. Recognition of complex object-centred spatial configurations in early infancy. Visual Cognition, 15(8), pp. 896-926. ISSN 1350-6285 [Article] (In Press)
Bremner, Andrew J., Bryant, P.E. and Mareschal, Denis. 2006. Object-centred spatial reference in 4-month-old infants. Infant Behavior and Development, 29(1), pp. 1-10. [Article]
Bremner, Andrew J. and Mareschal, D.. 2006. When do 4-month-olds remember the "what" and "where" of hidden objects? In: Y. Munakata and M. Johnson, eds. Processes of change in brain and cognitive development. (21) Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 427-447. ISBN 9780198568742 [Book Section]
Bremner, Andrew J. and Mareschal, Denis. 2004. Reasoning . . . what reasoning? Developmental Science, 7(4), pp. 419-421. ISSN 1363-755X [Article]
Spence, Charles and Bremner, Andrew J.. 2001. Crossmodal interactions in tactile perception. In: Matthew Hertenstein and Sandra Weiss, eds. The Handbook of Touch: Neuroscience, Behavioral, and Health Perspectives. Springer. ISBN 9780826121912 [Book Section]
Bremner, Andrew J. and Bryant, Peter E.. 2001. The effect of spatial cues on infants' responses in the AB task, with and without a hidden object. Developmental Science, 4(4), pp. 408-415. ISSN 1363-755X [Article]