How and when babies and young children understand what it means to be human is the subject of Dr Virginia Slaughter`s research within The University of Queensland`s School of Psychology.
Dr Slaughter has been awarded $45,000 in funding from the 2004 UQ Foundation Research Excellence Awards for a project examining the development of knowledge about human beings in infancy and early childhood.
A central element of the human experience is thinking about ourselves and the people around us, according to Dr Slaughter, a Senior Lecturer with the School.
“We’re all human so studying how we come to understand ourselves is important in itself for making sense of our lives,” Dr Slaughter said.
“In addition, if we can understand this aspect of normal development, we may gain new insights into some forms of developmental disorder where understanding self and others is atypical or incomplete, such as in autism and schizophrenia.
“In normal development, we first recognise that we are physical objects; then that we have minds; and finally, that we are biological organisms – we are born, we grow, we reproduce and one day we will die.”
Her research investigates each of these three stages of realisation through different experiments.
For example, to investigate infants’ and toddlers’ knowledge of humans at a physical level, their responses were gauged to images of both typical and “scrambled” human bodies.
“In essence, we found that infants were sensitive to ‘scrambled’ human bodies starting at between 15 and 18 months of age. This is surprisingly late, given babies’ well-documented face-recognition and processing abilities,” Dr Slaughter said.
She said it appeared that developmentally, this knowledge about humans as physical entities occurred first, providing the ground for learning about humans as psychological entities and then finally as biological organisms.
She said the Research Excellence Award funding would contribute to the next stage of her research, investigating in more depth how the different levels of knowledge interacted and informed each other.
“For example, it may be that hands, perhaps in conjunction with faces, are key to infant understandings of the whole person,” she said.
“Hands are often the focus of action and communication between toddlers and their peers and caregivers (pointing, imitating and gesturing) and as such, may lead the way in infants’ developing understanding of humans at both the physical and psychological levels.
“Research by Danielle McConnell, a postgraduate student in our lab, recently established that by 18 months of age, infants will imitate the actions of ‘disembodied’ human hands as easily and completely as they imitate a fully visible human actor.
“This finding suggests that hands alone may be interpreted by infants as being equivalent to a whole person.”
Dr Slaughter has a strong track record and reputation as a researcher in developmental psychology and has co-authored two books as well as written numerous book chapters and journal articles.
With Dr Thomas Suddendorf, Dr Slaughter established the Early Cognitive Development Unit within the School of Psychology, currently supporting the research of four PhD students and around 10 honours students.
In 1999, she won a UQ Award for Excellence in Teaching and an Early Career Research Excellence Award from the Australian Psychological Society.
She has a Bachelor of Arts from the Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, and a PhD in psychology from the University of California, Berkeley. From 1994-96, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Media contacts: Dr Slaughter (telephone: 07 3365 6397/6323 work, or 07 3378 0417 home, email: vps@psy.uq.edu.au) or Shirley Glaister at UQ Communications (telephone: 07 3365 2049, email: s.glaister@uq.edu.au). Videos and still photos are available at www.uq.edu.au/news/researchweek
