Inaugural Lecture of Professor Andrew J. Bremner

Join Proessor Andrew J. Bremner for his Inaugural Lecture, hosted at Aston Webb, Lecture Theatre WG5 (R39 on the Campus Map) on Wednesday 27 November 2024. This is a hybrid event: you can register for virtual access via Zoom here.

What is it like being a baby?

There’s a clue in the name. ‘Infant’ is derived from the Latin in fans (without speech). Human babies cannot tell us about their experiences and are uncooperative (to say the least) when it comes to following instructions in research experiments. In this lecture, I will describe how developmental psychologists since the 1960s have overcome these problems to open a window onto sensory abilities and experiences at the start of life. I will focus not just on visual or hearing abilities, but the full gamut of early experience including touch and chemosensory (smell and taste) perception, and how infants manage to join up their senses to perceive themselves in a coherent world.

As well as looking at what we understand of how sensory development works in neurotypical infants, I will also explain some of the recent insights which we are gaining from infants with very different early experiences – for instance when born without vision. I will also look to the future and what new highly sensitive brain imaging approaches and other methods promise to show us about how sensory development and sensory awareness unfolds in individual babies rather than just getting the average group picture.

Professor Andy Bremner is a developmental psychologist with expertise in multisensory perceptual development and the development of touch perception. He has particularly focused on examining how infants come to perceive their own bodies and their relation to the external world around them. Andy did his BA in Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford where he then went on to research for a DPhil with Prof. Peter Bryant, FRS.

Andy worked on two postdoctoral appointments, firstly with Prof. Denis Mareschal at the Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development, Birkbeck, University of London, and later with Prof. Axel Cleeremans at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles. In 2005 Andy took up an academic post at Goldsmiths, University of London where he was latterly Professor and Head of Psychology. In 2018, Andy moved to the School of Psychology, University of Birmingham where he is using a range of behavioural and brain-imaging methods to investigate the early development of sensory perception in human infancy.

A particular focus of Andy’s research is the development of multisensory processes, particularly those underlying body representations. From 2009-2015, Andy’s research was funded by the European Research Council grant, “Human Embodied Multisensory Development”. In 2012 Andy co-edited the book Multisensory Development (Oxford University Press) with Profs. David Lewkowicz and Charles Spence. Andy is also on the author teams of two popular international textbooks in psychology and developmental psychology (McGraw-Hill Education).

Everyone is welcome to this event, and all are invited to join Andy after the lecture for refreshments in the Lapworth Museum.