Professor Bennett I. Bertenthal is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago. He received a B.A. in psychology from Brandeis University in 1971, and a Ph.D. in developmental psychology from the University of Denver in 1978. From 1978-1979, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Brain Research Institute of UCLA Medical School.

Professor Bertenthal began his academic career at the University of Virginia in 1979 as an Assistant Professor and was promoted to Associate Professor in 1985 and Full Professor in 1990. From 1988 to 1990, he was an associate editor of the journal Developmental Psychology. He was a member of the Human Development and Aging Review Panel at NIH from 1991 to 1996, and served as chair from 1994 to 1996. He served as Chair of the Program Committee for the 1997 Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, and was a Member-at-Large of the American Psychological Association Division 7. From 1997 to 1999, he served as the Assistant Director of the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Directorate of the National Science Foundation. He has also served on a number of National Science and Technology Council subcommittees concerned with basic science and fundamental research on children. He is a member of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) steering committee on "Reinventing the social and behavioral sciences."

Professor Bertenthal is the author of over 70 publications on perceptual and cognitive development, developmental methodology, visual processing of motion information, and nonlinear modeling of posture and gait. Recent publications include an Annual Review of Psychology chapter on the origins of perception, action, and representation, and a Handbook of Child Psychology chapter on perception and action. He is a fellow of the American Psychological Society and the American Psychological Association, and he is a member of the Society for Research in Child Development, the Psychonomic Society, the International Society for Infant Studies, the International Society for the Study of Posture and Gait, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology. Professor Bertenthal was the recipient of a Career Development Award (1985-90) from the National Institutes of Health, and received the American Psychological Association¹s Boyd R. McCandless Young Scientist Award for distinguished research in 1985. During his career, he has been awarded more than 20 grants and fellowships from federal and private agencies to support his research and teaching.

Contact Information:
Green 215, Lab: Beecher 313
5848 South University Ave.
Chicago, IL 60637

Email: bertenthal@uchicago.edu

Other links: http://ccp.uchicago.edu/~bbertent/

Research Interests
Dr. Bertenthal's research focuses on the origins and early development of perception, action and representation. It is motivated by a conceptual framework grounded in the developing organization of the brain that is sensitive to the dynamic interplay between neural maturation and environmental stimulation. This framework was articulated in his 1996 Annual Review of Psychology chapter, and emphasizes a structural and functional dissociation between the perceptual control of actions and the representation of objects, people, and events. His laboratory is well prepared to address these issues for a number of reasons including: (1) significant research experience studying the development of the coupling between perception and action (e.g., posture, reaching, locomotion, etc.), as well as the early representation of objects and their properties; (2) familiarity and experience with a multidisciplinary set of research methods and techniques, such as biomechanics, signal processing, psychophysics, electrophysiology, and chronometric approaches; (3) experience with linear and nonlinear modeling approaches to complex sets of data; and (4) a large network of collaborators who support and complement the primary mission of this research. Recent research includes studies investigating the early development of the perception of motion information, visual control of posture and reaching, object tracking, object identity, perception of biological motions using psychophysical and neuroimaging approaches, and planning actions in real time vs. from memory.

Recent Publications
Articles
Bertenthal, B.I., & Hofsten, C. von  (1998).  Development of eye, head, and trunk control as prerequisites for reaching.  Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Review, 22, 515-526.

Bertenthal, B.I.  (1998).  Stepping into the future.  APS Observer, 11, 3.

Eizenman, D., & Bertenthal, B.I. (1998).  Infants' perception of partially occluded objects during rotation and translation.  Developmental Psychology, 34, 426-434.

Bertenthal, B. I.  (1998).  Invited Column:  Interdisciplinary research for the social and behavioral sciences.  APA Monitor, 29, 12.

Bertenthal, B.I.  (1999).  Variation and selection in the development of perception and action.  In G. Savelsbergh (Ed.), Nonlinear analyses of developmental processes.  Amsterdam:  Elsevier Science Publishers.

Banton, T., Bertenthal, B. I., & Seaks, J.  (1999).  Infants’ sensitivities to statistical distributions of motion direction.  Vision Research, 39, 3417-3430.

Liu, J., Golinkoff, R.M., Piper, K., Chung, H.L., Hirsh-Pasek, K., Ramey, C.H., & Bertenthal, B.I.  (2001).  Point-light displays illuminate the abstract nature of children’s motion verb representations.  Proceedings of the 22^nd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society.

Banton, T., Dobkins, K., & Bertenthal, B. I.  (2001).  Infant direction discrimination thresholds.  Vision Research, 41, 1049-1056.

Grezes, J., Fonlupt, P., Bertenthal, B., Delon-Martin, C., Mazoyer, P., & Decety, J.  (2001).  Does perception of biological motions rely on specific brain regions?  NeuroImage, 13, 775-785.

Bertenthal, B.I. (2002). Challenges and opportunities in the psychological sciences. American Psychologist, 57, 215-218.

Booth, A., Pinto, J., & Bertenthal, B.I. (2002). Perception of the symmetrical patterning of human gait by infants. Developmental Psychology, 38(4), 554-563.

Golinkoff, R.M., Chung, H.L., Hirsh-Pasek, K., Kin, J., Bertenthal, B.I., Brand, R., Maguire, M.J., & Hennon, E. (2002). Young children can extend motion verbs to point-light displays. Developmental Psychology, 38(4), 604-614.

Bertenthal, B.I. & Longo, M. (in press). Advancing our understanding of early perceptual and cognitive development. Human Development.

Witherington, D.C., vonHofsten, C., Rosander, K., Robinette, A., Woollacott, M., & Berthenthal, B.I. (in press). The development of anticipatory postural adjustments in infancy. Infancy.

Book Chapters
Bertenthal, B. I., & Clifton, R. K. (1997). Perception and action. In D. Kuhn & R. Siegler (Eds.), Handbook of Child Psychology. Vol. 2. Cognition, Perception, and Language. New York: Wiley.

Boker, S.M., Schreiber, T., Pompe, B., & Bertenthal, B.I. (1997). Mutual information, surrogate data tests and false nearest neighbors applied to the analysis of postural control. In G. Meyer-Kress, H. Hantz, & J. Kurths (Eds.), Nonlinear techniques in physiological time series analysis. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.

Bertenthal, B. I. (1999). Variation and selection in the development of perception and action. In G. Savelsbergh (Ed.), Nonlinear analyses of developmental processes. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science Publishers.

Bertenthal, B.I. (2001). Developmental changes in postural control during infancy. In J. vanderKamp, A. Ledebt, G. Savelsbergh, & E. Thelen (Eds.), Advances in motor development and learning in infancy. Amsterdam: Research Institute for Fundamental and Clinical Human Movement Sciences.

Selected Courses
Perception and action
Developmental cognitive neuroscience
Human infancy
Cognitive development
Research methods in developmental psychology
U.S. science and technology policy