Join the Department of Kinesiology for the second annual Clark-Whitall Endowed Lectureship in Motor Development on Friday, May 6, 2022, in the SPH Lecture Hall, Room 1312. This year's guest speaker is Dr. Daniela Corbetta from the Department of Psychology at the University of Tennessee Knoxville.
About Dr. Corbetta:
Dr. Daniela Corbetta is an expert in infant perceptual-motor development, with a focus on the formation of goal-directed behavior. She has studied infants arm control, investigated how repeated experience and exposure to objects can alter the developmental course of reaching, and has documented how other emerging motor skills such as crawling and walking interact with the organization and laterality of infants’ arm movements.
Much of her studies are the product of dense longitudinal studies that detail multiple behavioral changes over time. Dr. Corbetta co-authored 70 publications, one book and edited two others. She has presented 100+ papers at professional meetings and given 65 invited presentations across the globe. Dr. Corbetta is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, Fellow #574 of the National Academy of Kinesiology, she has been the President of the North American Society for the Psychology of Sport and Physical Activity, the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Motor Learning and Development and serves on the editorial boards of many journals in the developmental and movement science fields.
About the Lecture:
In her talk, A Perception-Action Framework to Understand Early Development, Dr. Corbetta will illustrate the complexities of how perception and action interact with each other in the formation of behavioral responses and entail the integration of multiple sensory sources and several motor components. She will show through a series of studies that infants are not very good at such multisensory-motor integration and that for it to occur, they need a lot of practice in perceiving and acting to form new skills, update them and refine them. She will illustrate that multisensory-motor integration in infancy progresses following distinct developmental steps, where these different levels of sensory and motor integration are assembled gradually over time and practice. In conclusion, Dr. Corbetta will discuss how this more complex perception-action framework can be applied to a variety of skills and learning contexts and can help capture basic processes of development.