About

Karen E. Adolph, PhD, is a professor in the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at NYU Grossman School of Medicine. Her research focuses on understanding how children learn to use everyday objects and develop motor skills, with particular attention to the processes of locomotion and motor development in infants. Her work explores the cultural practices and environmental factors that influence motor development, as well as the cognitive and perceptual aspects of learning new actions. Dr. Adolph has contributed to the field through numerous publications that examine the development of motor control, infant cognition, and the interaction between cultural practices and motor learning. Her research provides insights into the mechanisms underlying motor development and how they are shaped by both biological and environmental factors.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Psychology
• Developmental psychology
• Neuroscience
• Cognitive psychology
• Political Science
• World Wide Web
• Cognitive science
• Social psychology
• Data science

Selected publications

• Mouse Helpers Ensure Maternal-Infant Survival

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01

  preprintOpen access
  PublisherDOI

• Self-recognition: From touching the body to knowing the self

  Current Biology · 2024-03-01 · 2 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• A Computer-Vision Approach for Testing Developmental Changes in Object Manipulation

  2024-05-20 · 1 citations

  article

  Object manipulation is a foundational behavior that emerges in infancy and improves with age. Research on children's interactions with objects is a cornerstone for understanding cognitive and motor development. Traditionally, developmental researchers rely on human video annotation to analyze object interactions by categorizing behavioral events (e.g., “banging,” “constructing”). However, human video annotation cannot provide precise, quantitative details from moment to moment about the location and orientation of objects and the movements of each hand and finger during reach, grasp, and manipulation. To overcome the challenges in acquiring real-time, continuous, quantitative data, researchers turned to high-speed motion tracking and inertial measurement units—which require children to wear markers—and to instrumenting the objects. However, “wearables” present a new set of complications as they disrupt the natural spontaneity of children's movements and sensors may fail to accurately track changes in object position and orientation. Critically, only video data captures the subtleties and complexities of manual behavior and the surrounding context. Consequently, we devised a novel, video-based, marker- and sensor-free approach that enables real-time quantification of children's coordination patterns during object interaction. We demonstrate the power of our approach in a tower-building study with children (2 to 8 years) and adults. This approach marks a paradigm shift in testing the evolving dynamics of object manipulation over development.

  PublisherDOI

• Protracted development of motor cortex constrains rich interpretations of infant cognition

  Trends in Cognitive Sciences · 2023 · 66 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Psychology
  • Neuroscience
  • Developmental psychology
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Infant action and cognition: what's at stake?

  Trends in Cognitive Sciences · 2023-06-13 · 11 citations

  reviewOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Learning to Move in a Changing Body in a Changing World

  Integrative and Comparative Biology · 2023-06-24 · 7 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Infants of all species learn to move in the midst of tremendous variability and rapid developmental change. Traditionally, researchers consider variability to be a problem for development and skill acquisition. Here, we argue for a reconsideration of variability in early life, taking a developmental, ecological, systems approach. Using the development of walking in human infants as an example, we argue that the rich, variable experiences of infancy form the foundation for flexible, adaptive behavior in adulthood. From their first steps, infants must cope with changes in their bodies, skills, and environments. Rapid growth spurts and a continually expanding environment of surfaces, elevations, and obstacles alter the biomechanical constraints on balance and locomotion from day to day and moment to moment. Moreover, infants spontaneously generate a variable practice regimen for learning to walk. Self-initiated locomotion during everyday activity consists of immense amounts of variable, time-distributed, error-filled practice. From infants' first steps and continuing unabated over the next year, infants walk in short bursts of activity (not continual steps), follow curved (not straight) paths, and take steps in every direction (not only forward)-all the while, accompanied by frequent falls as infants push their limits (rather than a steady decrease in errors) and explore their environments. Thus, development ensures tremendous variability-some imposed by physical growth, caregivers, and a changing environment outside infants' control, and some self-generated by infants' spontaneous behavior. The end result of such massive variability is a perceptual-motor system adept at change. Thus, infants do not learn fixed facts about their bodies or environments or their level of walking skill. Instead, they learn how to learn-how to gauge possibilities for action, modify ongoing movements, and generate new movements on the fly from step to step. Simply put, variability in early development is a feature, not a bug. It provides a natural training regimen for successfully navigating complex, ever-changing environments throughout the lifespan. Moreover, observations of infants' natural behavior in natural, cluttered environments-rather than eliciting adult-like behaviors under artificial, controlled conditions-yield very different pictures of what infants of any species do and learn. Over-reliance on traditional tasks that artificially constrain variability therefore risks distorting researchers' understanding of the origins of adaptive behavior.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The process of learning the designed actions of toys

  Journal of Experimental Child Psychology · 2022-05-04 · 9 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Autism: The face value of eye contact

  Current Biology · 2022-06-01 · 9 citations

  letterOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Eleanor J. Gibson – Interview and reflection

  2022-11-25

  book-chapter

  In this interview conducted by Agnes Szokolszky in 1997, Eleanor J. Gibson recounts her early research career and how her perspective changed from differentiation theory to an ecological theory of perceptual learning, under the influence of her husband, James J. Gibson. She recounts the several decade-long research work and social atmosphere at Cornell University, where together they created a lively scientific center of ecological psychology. Eleanor Gibson gives a personal portrait of her husband and shares her observations on the reception of the Gibsonian approach in the scientific community in the 1980s and 1990s, and also on the development of ecological psychology as a movement. In her current reflection on the 1997 interview Karen Adolph, Eleanor Gibson's former graduate student at Emory University, commemorates her as a person and as a scientist and gives an imaginative representation of what Eleanor Gibson might think of the current state of psychology. The chapter contains a short biography and a list of Eleanor Gibson's ten most important publications.

  PublisherDOI

• Mouse helpers ensure maternal-infant survival

  bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) · 2022-12-26 · 9 citations

  preprintOpen access

  Summary Parental care is required for offspring survival, because infants require nearly-continual oversight for extensive periods. Parents must balance caretaking with their own survival, and benefit from help provided by other experienced adults. We built a system for 24/7 long-term monitoring of wild-type or oxytocin receptor knockout (OXTR-KO) mouse mothers (‘dams’) over litters. Some wild-type dams had high litter survival rates, but others consistently lost pups due to neglect and hypothermia. Maternal caretaking in low-pup-survival dams improved after co-housing with an experienced dam and litter, from reorganized maternal behavior including increased nest-building. In contrast, singly-housed OXTR-KOs died in childbirth and pups died due to prolonged parturition. Co-housing with a lactating female prevented OXTR-KO maternal-infant mortality, because the other female acted as a ‘midwife’ by removing and cleaning pups from the pregnant dam. Thus for single mothers that continually lose litters or die in labor, maternal-infant survival is enhanced by experienced helpers.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

• Learning About Hidden Affordances

  NIH · $2.1M · 2016–2022

• NIH Grant R01HD042697

  NIH · $1.5M · 2009

• Flexibility of Learning in Infant Skill Acquisition

  NIH · $4.9M · 1996–2018

• NIH Grant R29HD033486

  NIH · $551k · 2001

• Play & Learning Across a Year (PLAY)

  NIH · $6.3M · 2018–2026

Frequent coauthors

• Marion A. Eppler

  24 shared

• Catherine S. Tamis‐LeMonda

  New York University

  23 shared

• John M. Franchak

  University of California, Riverside

  21 shared

• Lana B. Karasik

  College of Staten Island

  20 shared

• Sarah E. Berger

  The Graduate Center, CUNY

  19 shared

• Rick O. Gilmore

  Pennsylvania State University

  16 shared

• Kari S. Kretch

  University of Southern California

  16 shared

• Beatrix Vereijken

  Norwegian University of Science and Technology

  15 shared

Labs

• Health Tech Hub TeamPI