Karen Adolph

Adolph received a B.A., in Psychology and Fine Arts in 1986 from Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, NY. She went to graduate school at Emory University, in Atlanta GA where she attained her M.A. in Experimental/Developmental Psychology in 1989 and a Ph.D. in Experimental/Developmental Psychology in 1993.[3][4] In 1994, she completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine.[5] She worked under Eleanor J. Gibson,[6] Esther Thelen, and Ulric Neisser. She was a member of the faculty at Carnegie Mellon until 1997 when she joined the NYU faculty.[7]

Adolph has held a number of positions over the duration of her career. She presided over the International Congress on Infant Studies until 2016.[8] Additionally, she has chaired the NIH Study Section on Motor Function and Speech Rehabilitation,[4][5] served on the Advisory Board of the McDonnell Foundation,[9] and has served on the editorial boards of the journals Developmental Psychobiology and Ecological Psychology.[10] [11] She has been a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and the American Psychological Society since 2006.[3]

She is currently Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at New York University (NYU) where she leads the Infant Action Lab at NYU, focusing on the study of behavioral flexibility in motor development.[12]

Adolph's work examines how individuals learn to adapt to changes in their bodies and develop skills to handle variation in the environment. She examines motor skill acquisition in infant humans and monkeys in order to track learning and development. Although much of her work has focused on infant development, the Infant Action Lab also conducts studies with children and adults.[4] One of their main research methodologies involves developing tasks that challenge infants, children, and adults with novel predicaments, such as crawling over bridges, squeezing through apertures, swinging over monkey bars, and reaching for targets with the body in motion. Adolph has studied infant locomotion and coordination by using infant head-mounted eye-tracking cameras to examine infants' patterns of visual attention as they played in a toy filled room with their mothers.[13]

Adolph was awarded the FIRST Award from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development from 1996 to 2001,[3] the APA Boyd McCandless Award in 1998,[14] the Young Investigator Award from the International Congress for Infant Studies in 1998,[3] the James McKeen Cattell Sabbatical Award from 2001 to 2002,[15] the American Psychological Foundation Robert L. Fantz Memorial Award in 2002,[16] the MERIT Award from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development from 2006 to 2016,[3] and the Golden Dozen Teaching Award from NYU in 2015.[17] In 2018, Adolph won the Kurt Koffka Medal, awarded by Giessen University for "advancing the fields of perception or developmental psychology to an extraordinary extent".[18]

• Adolph, K. E. (2008). Learning to move. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 17(3), 213-218.
• Adolph, K. E. (2000). Specificity of learning: Why infants fall over a veritable cliff. Psychological Science, 11(4), 290-295.

• Professor Adolph's NYU Faculty Profile
• Professor Adolph's NYU Action Lab
• Datavyu video coding and data visualization tool for behavioral data