Education
Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, he graduated from Michigan State University with a Bachelor of Arts with High Honors in Psychology, in 1971.
Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, he graduated from Michigan State University with a Bachelor of Arts with High Honors in Psychology, in 1971.
He is William R. Kenan Professor of Brain & Cognitive Sciences and Center for Visual Sciences at the University of Rochester. He is also Director of the Rochester Center for Brain Imaging and the Rochester Baby Laboratory His research covers many areas, but the bulk of his research concerns statistical learning, visual perception, speech perception, language development, and visual development.
A great deal of his work focuses on understanding how higher-level cognitive representations and structures are constructed from lower-level sensory input statistics, including how acoustic variation in speech to infants yields phonologically distinct speech sound categories in adults.
Aslin received his Doctor of Philosophy in Child Psychology from the University of Minnesota in 1975 at the Institute of Child Development. His advisor was Philip Salapatek.
He was a faculty member in the Department of Psychology at the Indiana University and a visiting researcher at the University of Washington and the University of Minnesota before joining the faculty at the University of Rochester. He is also the current President-elect of the International Society for Infant Studies.
Aslin studies infant perception and language development using eye tracking and neuroimaging methods.
Some of his early work concerned how infants learn the speech categories of their native language based on the noisy input of speech around them. He also studied how this process of forming speech categories interacts with word learning in young pre-verbal infants. Later work, with collaborators Jenny Saffran and Elissa L. Newport addressed how infants segment words from continuous speech by tracking the co-occurrence statistics of the syllables.
This research yielded many publications that are considered classics in the statistical learning literature, including a 1996 Science article, "Statistical Learning in 8-Month-Old Infants".
Some of his recent work has extended original findings about infants" ability to track environmental statistics in speech to the visual world. Recently he has studied how infants use statistics of the visual world in order to infer properties about the structure of objects in the world.
He has also recently conducted research investigating how infants allocate their attention in the visual world. He has collaborated on studies of adults" spoken word recognition, speech perception, and word learning with Michael Tanenhaus.
Aslin has been recognized by a number of organizations for the impact of his theoretical and empirical contributions to the fields of cognitive science and developmental psychology.
He also received numerous early career development awards, including ones from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the National Institute of Mental Health, the American Psychological Association, and the National Science Foundation. He was named a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
American Academy of Arts and Sciences.