astronomy

Richard N. Aslin

Richard N. Aslin is a astronomy topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Richard N. Aslin rather than just read about it. In short: Richard Norman Aslin (born August 9, 1949) is an American psychologist. He is currently a senior scientist at Haskins Laboratories and professor at Yale University.

Key takeaways

Richard N. Aslin belongs to astronomy; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Richard N. Aslin to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Richard N. Aslin from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Richard Norman Aslin (born August 9, 1949) is an American psychologist. He is currently a senior scientist at Haskins Laboratories and professor at Yale University. Until December, 2016, Dr. Aslin was William R. Kenan Professor of Brain & Cognitive Sciences and Center for Visual Sciences at the University of Rochester. During his time in Rochester, he was also director of the Rochester Center for Brain Imaging and the Rochester Baby Lab. He had worked at the university for over thirty years, until he resigned in protest of the university's handling of a sexual harassment complaint about a junior member of his department. His research covers many areas, but the bulk of it 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.

Biography Born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, he graduated from Michigan State University with a Bachelor of Arts with High Honors in Psychology, in 1971. Aslin received his Ph.D. 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 of the International Society for Infant Studies. In 2017, Aslin and eight other plaintiffs filed a federal lawsuit against the University of Rochester for its handling of a sexual misconduct complaint. In 2020, the university settled the case for $9.4 million without any admission of wrongdoing, but issued a statement thanking the plaintiffs for their efforts. He has a wife and two sons. His son Tim is an actor.

Research interests 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.

Recognition Aslin has been recognized by a number of organizations for his theoretical and empirical contributions to the fields of cognitive science and developmental psychology. He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate at Uppsala University in 2010, the Robert and Pamela Goergen Award for Distinguished Contributions to Undergraduate Learning in 2001, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1988. 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. In 2006, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 2014, he was inducted into the National Academy of Sciences In 2023, he was awarded the Kurt Koffka Medal for "advancing the fields of perception or developmental psychology to an extraordinary extent".

References

External links Richard Aslin's profile page Rochester Baby Lab

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Richard N. Aslin

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Richard N. Aslin claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In astronomy, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Richard N. Aslin before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Richard N. Aslin ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Richard N. Aslin

In research: Richard N. Aslin appears in astronomy research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Richard N. Aslin in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Richard N. Aslin is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1949 births, 20th-century American psychologists, 21st-century American psychologists, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Richard N. Aslin outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Richard N. Aslin in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Richard N. Aslin means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Richard N. Aslin out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Richard N. Aslin in simple terms?

Richard Norman Aslin (born August 9, 1949) is an American psychologist. He is currently a senior scientist at Haskins Laboratories and professor at Yale University.

Why does Richard N. Aslin matter?

Because it connects several astronomy ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Richard N. Aslin?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Richard N. Aslin.