Dr. Sarah Berger, Professor of Psychology at the College of Staten Island, has been selected for a prestigious Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award. The award will see Dr. Berger support her groundbreaking research on infant development in collaboration with international experts in computer vision and robotics in Prague, Czech Republic. It is the second time she has received a Fulbright honor.
Dr. Berger will collaborate with Dr. Matej Hoffmann, a leading computer vision scientist, at Czech Technical University. Together, they will work to address a crucial methodological gap in developmental science: the lack of computer vision tools that can accurately automate posture and pose estimation in infants.
“Receiving a Fulbright Scholar Award is an honor because it represents the recognition of my work at an international level and the value of interdisciplinary collaboration,” Dr. Berger shared.
Her research seeks to combine developmental psychology and artificial intelligence to develop tools that can categorize infant posture and movement from video recordings. This work will facilitate the exploration of three central questions in the field:
- What drives night wakings associated with the onset of new motor milestones?
- What role does proprioception play in the development of body knowledge?
- Can computer vision techniques support early detection of developmental issues such as torticollis?
Dr. Berger brings more than two decades of expertise in the study of infant motor and cognitive development to this international collaboration. Her Fulbright project represents a significant evolution of her work.
“I have been studying the relation between cognitive and motor development in infancy for about 25 years, concentrated on how infants’ movements and motor abilities relate to learning,” she noted. “For my Fulbright Award, my work at the Czech Technical Institute will serve to automate some of the behavioral coding that my students and I have been doing by hand. Once we have a system for automated posture detection, we will be able to use these tools to address a wide range of questions fundamental to developmental science.”
Ultimately, the team hopes their efforts will also contribute to the creation of embodied computational models on humanoid robots, a forward-thinking application that could provide insights into how babies learn to understand their own bodies and navigate the space around them.
Dr. Berger received a Fulbright Scholar Award during the 2010-2011 academic year, spending that year at the University of Haifa in Israel. Her selection underscores CSI’s continued commitment to international academic collaboration and excellence in research, and she is part of a strong list of CSI faculty members who have received Fulbright honors, further solidifying the College’s role as a center for impactful global research.
