Carolyn Rovee-Collier, founder of infant long-term memory research, will deliver the 2007 Lipsitt-Duchin Lecture in Child Behavior and Development on Thursday, Oct. 18, 2007, at 4 p.m. in the Salomon Center for Teaching. The lecture is free and open to the public.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Rutgers University Professor Carolyn Rovee-Collier will visit Brown University to deliver the 2007 Lipsitt-Duchin Lecture in Child Behavior and Development on Thursday, Oct. 18, 2007, at 4 p.m. in the Salomon Center for Teaching, located on The College Green.

The lecture is free and open to the public. Rhode Island KIDS COUNT and Brown’s Center for the Study of Human Development are sponsoring the event.

In her lecture, titled “The Secret Life of Infants,” Rovee-Collier will detail recent discoveries about infant learning and memory. Rovee-Collier, a professor of psychology at Rutgers, is recognized as the founder of infant long-term memory research and an innovator in the scientific quest to understand how experience in the first few months of life affects later behavior.

Rovee-Collier developed a procedure in which a ribbon connected an infant’s ankle to a crib mobile, a procedure that allowed her to test learning and long-term memory in pre-verbal babies. One of Rovee-Collier’s main discoveries was that infants’ forgotten memories can be completely recovered months later by exposing them to a brief reminder of the original event.

“We have found that very young infants can remember for periods of weeks to months as well as some of the ways they do it,” Rovee-Collier said. “These findings provide new insights into how the early knowledge base is created, elaborated and maintained.”

Rovee-Collier has authored more than 200 publications on infant learning and memory. She was president of the International Society for Infant Studies, the International Society for Developmental Psychobiology, and the Eastern Psychological Association, editor of the international journal Infant Behavior and Development, and senior editor of the book series Advances in Infancy Research. In 2003, Rovee-Collier was awarded the Howard Crosby Warren Medal from the Society of Experimental Psychologists, one of the oldest and most highly coveted awards to experimental psychologists.

Lewis Lipsitt, professor emeritus of psychology at Brown and founder of the Child Study Center, will make introductory remarks, along with Elizabeth Burke Bryant, executive director of Rhode Island KIDS COUNT, and Ronald Seifer, professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown and director of the Center for the Study of Human Development, which is supported by the Mittlemann Family Trust.

The audience will have an opportunity to ask questions following the lecture. For more information, contact the Center for the Study of Human Development at 
(401) 863-7515.

Editors: Brown University has a fiber link television studio available for domestic and international live and taped interviews and maintains an ISDN line for radio interviews. For more information, call the Office of Media Relations at (401) 863-2476.

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