Dr Andy Bremner - Research projects

My research is concerned with the development of perception and understanding of the sensory environment in infancy and early childhood. Current focuses include: i) the development of multimodal spatial perception, ii) the development of spatial representations of external space, the body, and peripersonal space, iii) the development of executive function (both motor planning, and cognitive control), and iv) the development of object recognition and memory in infancy and early childhood. I am currently leading a 5 year European Research Council (ERC) funded research grant entitled "Human Embodied Multisensory Development (HEMSDEV)", and am currently recruiting PhD students to conduct research as a part of this project.

I outline below four potential focuses for PhD projects which I would be particularly interested in supervising. I am also prepared to discuss any ideas which you may have within the broad area of cognitive development in infancy and early childhood. Applicants for an ERC funded studentship should compose their research proposal around one of the first 3 themes.

Spatial representations of touch and the body in early infancy

Touch provides an important source of information about the physical environment. One reason for referring to the tactile sense is that it provides unique information concerning our spatial environment. Touch can only be stimulated by objects in our immediate (or peripersonal) spatial environment. As visual and indeed auditory information provide information about objects in both near and far space, tactile spatial information is not only of use in its own right, but can also disambiguate which cues from the other senses (e.g. vision and audition) specify aspects of our peripersonal environment; the environment within reach. Despite the important and unique role implicated for touch in human spatial representation, it is only recently that researchers have begun investigating the development of tactile representation in infancy (Bremner, Mareschal, Lloyd-Fox, & Spence, 2008b) A PhD project in this area could investigate infants' ability to use touch for object recognition, for locating objects in the environment, and in locating the limbs relative to the external environment.

Neural representation of tactile spatial location and the body in early infancy

In relation to the first project (“Spatial representations of touch and the body  in early infancy”), I am interested in supervising a PhD project which would examine neural correlates of the development of tactile spatial perception in infancy, and early childhood. This project would involve behavioural and electrophysiological (EEG/ERP) assessment of multisensory processing across the first year of life (in particular the interaction of touch and vision).For a review of work in this area see Bremner, Holmes & Spence (2008a).

The development of visual capture in tactile perception and felt limb position in infancy and early childhood

Aristotle observed that when we cross our limbs we become confused about the location of tactile stimuli. More recently, researchers have argued that this is due to the dominant influence of a visual spatial frame of reference over spatial information about tactile location coming from somatosensory signals. Likewise, it has been observed that visual information about the location of the limbs can dominate when this is artificially put into conflict with proprioceptive information coming from the limbs themselves (e.g. in Botvinick & Cohen’s “Rubber hand illusion”). An interesting question concerns how this visual dominance of the touch senses (somatosensation, proprioception & kinaesthesis) develops. Recent research from our lab (Bremner et al., 2008b) indicates an influence of a visual spatial framework touch perception in early infancy. Nonetheless, early and more recent developmental research suggests continued development into late childhood (Pagel, Heed, & Röder, 2009). A PhD in this area could investigate the development of visual spatial dominance of touch and limb position in infancy and/or early childhood, utilizing a variety of techniques (infant looking behaviour, infant electrophysiological measures, & psychophysical measures of illusory effects in young children).

Development of cognitive control in early childhood

Research into cognitive control in infancy and early childhood is central to our understanding of the origins and development of cognition. As well as establishing that a given age-group has attained a certain level of knowledge or conceptual complexity, it is equally important to determine the extent of control that they have over this knowledge. Knowledge that cannot be controlled and deployed strategically is of little use. A PhD project investigating the early development of cognitive control could tackle the early development of control in infants' means-end manual object interactions (e.g. Bremner & Bryant, 2001), and/or the ability to control deployment of more abstract (e.g. sequential) knowledge in early childhood (e.g. Bremner, Mareschal, Destrebecqz, & Cleeremans, 2007).

References

Bremner, A. J., & Bryant, P.E. (2001). The effect of  spatial cues on infants' responses in the AB task, with and without a hidden object. Developmental Science, 4, 408-415.

Bremner, A. J., & Holmes, N. P., & Spence, C. (2008a). Infants lost in (peripersonal) space? Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 12, 298-305. 

Bremner, A. J., Mareschal, D., Destrebecqz, A., & Cleeremans, A. (2007). Cognitive control of sequential knowledge in 2-year-olds: Evidence from a sequence learning and generation task. Psychological Science, 18,261-266.

Bremner, A. J., Mareschal, D., Lloyd-Fox, S., & Spence, C. (2008b). Spatial localization of touch in the first year of life: Early influence of a visual spatial code, and the development of updating across changes in limb position. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General., 137,149-162.

Pagel, B., Heed, T., & Röder, B. (2009). Change of reference frame for tactile localization during child development. Developmental Science, 12, 929-937.

Renshaw, S. (1930). The errors of cutaneous localization and the effect of practice on the localizing movement in children and adults. Journal of Genetic Psychology, 28, 223-238.