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Emily W. Bushnell

Contact Info Department of Psychology Tufts University Psychology Building Room 122 Medford, MA 02155 Tel: 617-627-2532 Email Professor

Professor of Psychology
Ph.D., University of Minnesota, 1979

Emily Bushnell has been a member of the Psychology Department at Tufts University since 1979. She is currently a Full Professor in the department and also directs the Behavioral Development Lab. Dr. Bushnell received her B.A. in Psychology from Swarthmore College in 1972 and her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from the University of Minnesota's Institute of Child Development in 1979. Since then, in addition to working at Tufts, Dr. Bushnell has also been a Visiting Fellow at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia; a Visiting Research Fellow at St. Andrews University in St. Andrews, Scotland; and the Edward F. Arnold Visiting Professor at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. Dr. Bushnell has published numerous scientific articles and given many professional presentations on her work in the area of perceptual-motor and cognitive development during infancy. She served as Chair of Tufts' Psychology Department from 1993-1996 and has been active on faculty governance committees within the university throughout her career. Dr. Bushnell has also served on National Institutes of Health study sections to review research grants and on the editorial boards of several scientific journals. She recently served as Co-chair of the Program Committee for the 2007 meetings of the Society for Research in Child Development and currently sits on the editorial board of SRCD's premier journal Child Development. In her spare time, Dr. Bushnell enjoys biking, white-water canoeing, playing poker, and visiting with her two adult children.

Dr. Bushnell's research focuses on infants' perceptual-motor and cognitive abilities. In her early work, she studied infants' reaching, infants' processing of visual stimuli, and infants' haptic (by touch) perception. Currently, she is interested in the evolution and development of tool-using, and is conducting research on imitation as a primary mechanism for learning to use objects during infancy. In recent studies, for example, she has investigated how infants choose which actions to imitate from several that are demonstrated, whether infants can generalize actions learned by imitation to new objects and contexts, and whether infants' prior experience with objects biases their ability to learn new ways to use them through imitation. In other research, Dr. Bushnell is examining how newly walking infants adjust their behavior to carry large, heavy, or multiple objects, and in collaboration with Dr. Caroline Cao of the Mechanical Engineering Department she is investigating how using remote tools such as endoscopes may affect an operator's perception and performance while conducting surgery.

Students can get involved in research with Dr. Bushnell during the academic year either through one of the independent research courses or on a volunteer basis. If interested, please contact her by e-mail at emily.bushnell@tufts.edu.

Representative Publications

• Bushnell, E. W., & Boudreau, J. P. (1998). Exploring and exploiting objects with the hands during infancy. In K. Connolly (Ed.), The Psychobiology of the Hand (pp. 144-161). Cambridge, UK: Mac Keith Press.
• Bushnell, E. W., & Baxt, C. (1999). Children's haptic and cross-modal recognition with familiar and unfamiliar objects. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 25, 1867-1881.
• Roder, B. J., Bushnell, E. W., & Sasseville, A. M. (2000). Infants' preferences for familiarity and novelty during the course of visual processing. Infancy, 1, 491-507.
• Bushnell, E. W. (2000). Two steps forward, one step back. Infancy, 1, 225-230. (Invited commentary on target article by J. Campos in same issue).
• Boudreau, J. P., & Bushnell, E. W. (2000). Spilling thoughts: Configuring attentional resources in infants' goal-directed actions. Infant Behavior and Development, 23, 543- 566.
• Bushnell, E. W. (2005). Stats modules for babies! Computing conditional probabilities and weighted variance with rapid sampling: Comments on the presentations by Aslin and Banks. In C. A. Nelson (Ed.), Action as an Organizer of Learning and Development, Minnesota Symposium on Child Psychology, vol. 33.
• Striano, T., & Bushnell, E. W. (2005). Haptic perception of material properties by 3-month-old infants. Infant Behavior and Development, 28, 266-289.
• Bushnell, E. W., Sidman, J., & Brugger, A. E. (2006). Transfer according to the means in human infants: The secret to generative tool-use? In ROUX, V. and BRIL, B. (eds). Stone Knapping : the necessary conditions for a uniquely hominid behaviour (pp. 303 317). McDonald Institute monograph series, Cambridge, UK (Actes du workshop de Pont- -Mousson, 21-24 novembre 2001).
• Mumme, D. L., Bushnell, E. W., DiCorcia, J. A., & Lariviere, L. A. (2007). Infants' Use of Gaze Cues to Interpret Others' Actions and Emotional Reactions. In R. Flom, K. Lee, and D. Muir (Eds.), Gaze Following: Its Development and Significance, pp. 143-170. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
• Brugger, A., Lariviere, L. A., Mumme, D. L., and Bushnell, E. W. (2007). Doing the right thing: Infants' selection of actions to imitate from observed event sequences. Child Development, 78, 806-824.