Multisensory integration in the development of mobility / Pitch organization in music cognition

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My research program consists of two parallel streams - one in perceptual-motor development and the other in adult music cognition. Because these programs are theoretically and empirically divergent, these research streams are described separately. Cutting across these programs is an interest in how perception functions across basic motor tasks and complex auditory processing. Research in Perceptual-Motor Development: My research in perceptual-motor development focuses on the development of mobility in children. Why such an interest in mobility? Simply put, the acquisition of mobility is, along with learning to communicate, one of the two most critical milestones in early development. As such, this achievement provides an invaluable window into basic processes of development. Within this framework my work assumes a "multisensory" approach to the development of mobility. Such a framework emphasizes, and subsequently explores, the contributions of multisensory information - including vision, audition, touch, and body sense (e.g., proprioception and kinaesthetic) to three basic aspects of mobility: How toddlers and young children learn to balance on two legs, how they learn to walk, and how they make their way around the world (spatial orientation). Within each of these domains, the primary experimental thrust involves modifying the nature of the various sensory system information, and examining the impact of such changes on children's ability to maintain their balance, to walk around a crowded environment, or to find previously seen objects that are now hidden from view. The ultimate goal of this work is to determine what sources of sensory information are used by children at different ages to complete the tasks required for mobility, and how the relative contributions of these different sensory inputs change with increasing age and experience. Research in Music Cognition: In Western music, pitch is the primary dimension of interest when individuals listen to music. My work in musical cognition focuses on how it is that adults are able to understand pitch during music listening, and more specifically, how the understand the complex "pitch structures" they typically encounter when listening to various forms of music. This work has emphasized two complementary pitch structures - the idea of musical tonality, which is the structuring of all of the possible notes one could hear around a central reference tone, and the idea of melodic contour, which involves the patterns of rises and falls in pitch that one typically hears in a melody. Both of these processes have been formally modeled, and these models are currently being extended to incorporate both rhythmic and metrical information, as well as in terms of their applicability to other aspects of pitch information, such as harmonic structure. In general, this research provides insights into how it is that adults perceive, respond to, remember, and potentially perform, complex musical information.