One special question will be how children's sleep is involved in the development of regulation for different kinds of children in different kinds of parenting environments. Questions addressed in this laboratory center on describing and elucidating functional and mechanistic aspects of the development of species-typical behavior in rodents. Current projects include sensory and motor capabilities of fetal rats, thermal and oxygen homeostasis, suckling and weaning in rat pups and other aspects of parental behavior. In all these projects, Alberts combines behavioral and physiological approaches. This laboratory is used for research on visual event perception and perceptually guided reaching.
Investigations ask about visual properties of arm trajectories used as information about events.
Other studies focus on what haptic and optic information is used to guide targeted reaching and the form of the implied control structure. Research in this laboratory deals with the general question of how far neurally-inspired associationist models can account for the acquisition of natural language by young children, specifically how children learn about the internal structure of words and sentences. This laboratory features two ongoing lines of research. The primary focus is on plastic changes in the adult primate somatosensory system following peripheral nerve injury. The second line of research investigates the cognitive side-effects of anticonvulsant compounds in rats, rabbits, and humans, employing several instrumental learning paradigms.