The conference Chairs are proud to announce the opening keynote speaker for fNIRS2020 Boston: Richard Aslin!!
Professor Aslin is a developmental psychologist and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He is currently a Senior Scientist at Haskins Laboratories.
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.
His research interests span visual perception, speech perception, language development, and visual development. His research on implicit mechanisms of learning, devoid of reinforcement or feedback, established a novel approach called statistical learning which entails sensitivity to the distributional properties of perceptual input. Using eye-trackers to study how attention is allocated to visual and auditory input, Aslin has documented the remarkable ability of infants to learn the underlying structure of information, to anticipate upcoming information, and to combine difference sources of information. He has also used neuroimaging techniques, like fMRI and fNIRS, to reveal which areas of the infant and adult brain are activated during statistical learning.
Aslin studies of language processing in infants, children, and adults have revealed remarkably sophisticated abilities to discriminate speech sounds, adapt to new speech categories, segment words from fluent speech, recognize the meanings of words, and form grammatical categories. His studies of visual learning have uncovered powerful mechanisms for extracting new features that are combined to form a hierarchy of representations for both familiar and novel objects and scenes.