Featured Faculty
Rain-Bosworth
National Technical Institute for the Deaf
Dr. Bosworth is an Experimental Psychologist who studies how early sensory input shapes perception and cognition. One way to study how unique sensory experience shapes us is to compare perceptual abilities in unique populations. For example, she studied healthy premature infants, to determine whether their “additional” postnatal experience, as a result of being born accelerates their visual development. This work shows that preterm infants who are born 6 weeks early, and see the world’s full spectrum of light, can see color contrasts better than fullterm infants do.
She also studies deaf children and adults, testing the hypothesis that they may have “enhanced” visual abilities, because of their increased reliance on vision and their experience using a visual signed language. Her recent work on infants born to deaf parents who use sign language shows that, as early as 5.5 months, infants’ gaze patterns are different and more focused than infants who do not have parents who use sign language.
Indeed, there are strong correlations in the distribution of gaze points and age of when deaf or hearing adults learned ASL. Compared to late and novice signers, early native signers exhibited more focused fixations in their gaze patterns, and gaze patterns were highly correlated with earlier age of acquisition, better comprehension and higher lexical recall.
Dr. Bosworth recently founded the NTID Perception, Language & Attention In Youth (PLAY) Lab. In this lab, she uses experimental techniques in the laboratory to see how atypical sensory and language experiences impact development of cognitive abilities. This includes measuring thresholds to discriminate small visual differences and eye tracking to determine gaze and saccade patterns. By studying a wide range of ages from infancy to adulthood, her work can reveal what aspects of vision and attention are more versus less shaped by early visual experience, and may have important implications for understanding the effects of “nature” versus “nurture” on human development.
She teaches classes related to human development, perception, neuroscience, and cognition. In teaching, she uses her own “lens” as a deaf person, to frame both “real world” and laboratory-based scientific approaches about concepts in linguistics, communication, bilingualism, and cultural and “cognitive” diversity.
Rain Bosworth
Assistant Professor
National Technical Institute for the Deaf