Rain Bosworth
Associate Professor
Rain Bosworth
Associate Professor
Bio
Video Bio
Dr. Rain Bosworth is an associate professor in Department of Liberal Studies at RIT/NTID and affiliated faculty in the RIT Cognitive Science program. She is a deaf experimental psychologist, studying development of perception and language in infants and children at the newly-founded Perception, Language and Attention in Youth (PLAY) Lab. For her doctoral degree at the University of California, San Diego, she studied visual motion processing and attention in deaf adults, to better understand how deafness and sign language experience impact perceptual abilities. She is currently investigating visual and tactile exploratory behaviors in infants, children and adults to address questions about how we learn and process sign language. She has also studied how easily visual abilities are recovered in children who were treated for congenital eye disorders. Together, these lines of research reveal how early sensory input shapes perception, cognition, and language processing. Dr. Bosworth teaches courses in Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, Developmental Psychology, Biopsychology, and Research Methods. Her video bio can be viewed here. More information on how parents can enroll in her Exploratory Behaviors Museum Study at the Strong Museum of Play can be found here.
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In the News
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May 9, 2022
New lab studies cognitive development in children
Rain Bosworth, an assistant professor and experimental psychologist at RIT’s National Technical Institute for the Deaf, has created a new research lab that will help scientists learn more about cognition, language, and perception in infants and young children.
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September 21, 2021
RIT awarded nearly $2 million for NSF Research Traineeship Program, AWARE-AI
To help address a lack of diversity, as well as gaps in AI curricula, RIT was awarded a grant of nearly $2 million by the NSF to create a new research traineeship program for graduate students
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March 30, 2021
RIT/NTID researcher finds that sign-language exposure impacts infants as young as 5 months old
While it isn’t surprising that infants and children love to look at people’s movements and faces, recent research from NTID studies exactly where they look when they see someone using sign language. The research uses eye-tracking technology that offers a non-invasive and powerful tool to study cognition and language learning in pre-verbal infants.
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November 17, 2025
Tellander, Fitch, and Bosworth present at Conference on Language Development
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November 1, 2024
Bosworth research on sign-language acquisition cited