Robert Lickliter
Biographic Data
| ID | 144954 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Robert Lickliter |
| GIVEN NAMES | Robert |
| FAMILY NAME | Lickliter |
| SIGNATURE | LICKLITER R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Florida International University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0145-4138 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 35 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 53 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 35 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1990 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Introduction to the Special Issue on Developmental Plasticity in Early Human Development
Introduction to the Special Issue
No abstract, as this is an introduction to a special issue and effectively serves as an editorial
Molecular and Systemic Epigenetic Inheritance
Currently, a central problem for theoretical biology is the integration of development with genetics and evolutionary theory. Through the late 20th century, biologists held that animals resemble their ancestors strictly because of the transgenerational transmission of DNA. This view effectively wrote development out of evolutionary biology. However, many molecular and developmental biologists now understand that phenotypes – anatomical, physiolog…
What Taking Development Seriously Means for Evolutionary Theory
Proponents of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) emphasize the critical role that organisms and their development play in the process of evolution. This framework explicitly rejects the genocentric focus that once dominated interpretations of the Modern Synthesis in evolutionary theory. In place of genocentrism, EES highlights processes like niche construction, developmental constraint, and extragenetic inheritance as central to any unders…
Evolving evolutionary psychology
Which evolutionary theory can best benefit psychological theory, research, and application? The most well-known school of evolutionary psychology has a narrow conceptual perspective (a.k.a., "Narrow Evolutionary Psychology" or NEP). Proponents of NEP have long argued that their brand of evolutionary psychology represents a full-fledged scientific revolution, with Buss (2020) recently likening NEP's scientific impact to that of a Copernican or Dar…
Metatheory and the Primacy of Conceptual Analysis in Developmental Science
The practice of science entails more than just repeated cycles of theory construction, hypothesis generation, and empirical investigation. Broader, metatheoretical levels of conceptualization necessarily condition all aspects of the research process, establishing the very meaning and sensibility of science’s empirical and theoretical activities. When debate arises at these metatheoretical levels, it is the subject of conceptual analysis, not empi…
An Intelligent Guide to Human Intelligence
Towards a Truly Developmental Epigenetics
Conceptual and empirical advances across the biological and psychological sciences have made it increasingly clear that genetic and environmental factors cannot be meaningfully partitioned when attempting to explain development. This should be a major theme within the contemporary field of epigenetics. However, the field has yet to fully extricate itself from reductionist tendencies in its conceptualization of developmental relations. Epigenetics…
Transcending the Nature-Nurture Debate through Epigenetics
Integrating Development and Evolution in Psychological Science
New attempts in psychological science at integrating developmental (individual-level) and evolutionary (population-level) accounts of phenotypic stability and variability have achieved increasing prominence of late. Foremost among such attempts is the field of evolutionary developmental psychology (EDP). EDP proposes that selective pressures in evolution inform psychological development through a synthesis of the Darwinian/neo-Darwinian selection…
Blinking Bird Brains
Contingency perception is critical during infancy, providing the basis for the continuous learning (and re‐learning) of the relation between the developing body, self‐produced actions, and the environment. Nevertheless, relatively few studies have systematically examined the spatiotemporal parameters that optimize learning during development. Here, we present a series of experiments exploring a novel timing‐specific deficit in auditory learning i…
Intrasensory Redundancy Facilitates Infant Detection of Tempo
Research has demonstrated that intersensory redundancy (stimulation synchronized across multiple senses) is highly salient and facilitates processing of amodal properties in multimodal events, bootstrapping early perceptual development. The present study is the first to extend this central principle of the intersensory redundancy hypothesis ( IRH ) to certain types of intrasensory redundancy (stimulation synchronized within a single sense). Infan…
The development of face perception in infancy
Although research has demonstrated impressive face perception skills of young infants, little attention has focused on conditions that enhance versus impair infant face perception. The present studies tested the prediction, generated from the intersensory redundancy hypothesis (IRH), that face discrimination, which relies on detection of visual featural information, would be impaired in the context of intersensory redundancy provided by audiovisu…
Exploring the dynamics of development and evolution
Blair and Raver (2012) have provided an organism-in-environment conceptualization of the development of stress response physiology and its relation to the development of self-regulation. They argue that we must consider the context in which self-regulation and stress reactivity occur to understand their implications for developmental outcome. More generally, they present a cogent argument for why it is necessary to think developmentally when cons…
The Critical Role of Temporal Synchrony in the Salience of Intersensory Redundancy During Prenatal Development
We explored the amount and timing of temporal synchrony necessary to facilitate prenatal perceptual learning using an animal model, the bobwhite quail. Quail embryos were exposed to various audiovisual combinations of a bobwhite maternal call paired with patterned light during the late stages of prenatal development and were tested postnatally for evidence of prenatal auditory learning of the familiarized call. Results revealed that a maternal ca…
The Fallacy of Partitioning
Ecological psychologists have long championed the importance of the concept of the organism-environment system and highlighted its value to our understanding of perception, action, and cognition (G
Theories of Attachment
Thinking About Development
Gottlieb promoted the value of a developmental psychobiological systems approach to the study of human development. This approach recognizes the importance of comparative, animal-based research to advancing our understanding of the complexities and dynamics of the process of development. The major contribution of animal developmental studies is their provision of food for thought (hypotheses, not facts) about human development and general princip…
Up Versus Down
According to the intersensory redundancy hypothesis (IRH), during early development, perception of nonredundantly specified properties is facilitated in unimodal stimulation as compared with bimodal stimulation. Later in development, attention becomes more flexible and infants can detect nonredundantly specified properties in both unimodal and bimodal stimulation. This study tested these predictions by assessing the development of infants' sensit…
Animal Models and Human Development
Intersensory Redundancy Enhances Memory in Bobwhite Quail Embryos
Information presented concurrently and redundantly to 2 or more senses (intersensory redundancy) has been shown to recruit attention and promote perceptual learning of amodal stimulus properties in animal embryos and human infants. This study examined whether the facilitative effect of intersensory redundancy also extends to the domain of memory. We assessed bobwhite quail chicks' ability to remember and prefer an individual maternal call present…
The Various Roles of Animal Models in Understanding Human Development
In this article, the authors take a very conservative view of the contribution of animal models to an understanding of human development. We do not think that homologies can be readily documented with even our most closely related relatives’ behavior and psychological functioning. The major contribution of animal models is their provision of food for thought (hypotheses, not facts) about human development and general principles of development, an…
Developmental Dynamics and Contemporary Evolutionary Psychology
The authors address commentaries by D. F. Bjorklund (2003); D. M. Buss and H. K. Reeve (2003); C. B. Crawford (2003); D. L. Krebs (2003); and J. Tooby, L. Cosmides, and H. C. Barrett (2003) on their analysis of the underlying assumptions of contemporary evolutionary psychology (R. Lickliter & H. Honeycutt, 2003). The authors argue that evolutionary psychology currently offers no coherent framework for how to integrate genetic, environmental, and …
Developmental Dynamics
There has been a conceptual revolution in the biological sciences over the past several decades. Evidence from genetics, embryology, and developmental biology has converged to offer a more epigenetic, contingent, and dynamic view of how organisms develop. Despite these advances, arguments for the heuristic value of a gene-centered, predeterministic approach to the study of human behavior and development have become increasingly evident in the psy…
Intersensory redundancy facilitates prenatal perceptual learning in bobwhite quail (Colinus virginianus) embryos
Information presented redundantly and in temporal synchrony across sensory modalities (intersensory redundancy) selectively recruits attention and facilitates perceptual learning in human infants. This comparative study examined whether intersensory redundancy also facilitates perceptual learning prenatally. The authors assessed quail (Colinus virginianus) embryos' ability to learn a maternal call when it was (a) unimodal, (b) concurrent but asyn…
Developmental Dynamics
There has been a conceptual revolution in the biological sciences over the past several decades. Evidence from genetics, embryology, and developmental biology has converged to offer a more epigenetic, contingent, and dynamic view of how organisms develop. Despite these advances, arguments for the heuristic value of a gene-centered, predeterministic approach to the study of human behavior and development have become increasingly evident in the psy…
Intersensory redundancy guides attentional selectivity and perceptual learning in infancy
This study assessed an intersensory redundancy hypothesis, which holds that in early infancy information presented redundantly and in temporal synchrony across two sense modalities selectively recruits attention and facilitates perceptual differentiation more effectively than does the same information presented unimodally.Five-month-old infants' sensitivity to the amodal property of rhythm was examined in 3 experiments.Results revealed that habit…
Intersensory experience and early perceptual development
Related experiments examined the effects of attenuated prenatal sensory stimulation on subsequent postnatal auditory and visual responsiveness in precocial bobwhite quail chicks {Colinus virginianus). Results revealed that denying quail embryos the prenatal vestibular and tactile stimulation provided by broodmates during incubation alters pre- and postnatal perceptual functioning. Chicks incubated in physical isolation during the late stages of p…
The development of face perception in infancy
Although research has demonstrated impressive face perception skills of young infants, little attention has focused on conditions that enhance versus impair infant face perception. The present studies tested the prediction, generated from the intersensory redundancy hypothesis (IRH), that face discrimination, which relies on detection of visual featural information, would be impaired in the context of intersensory redundancy provided by audiovisu…
The Various Roles of Animal Models in Understanding Human Development
In this article, the authors take a very conservative view of the contribution of animal models to an understanding of human development. We do not think that homologies can be readily documented with even our most closely related relatives’ behavior and psychological functioning. The major contribution of animal models is their provision of food for thought (hypotheses, not facts) about human development and general principles of development, an…
Intersensory redundancy facilitates prenatal perceptual learning in bobwhite quail (Colinus virginianus) embryos
Information presented redundantly and in temporal synchrony across sensory modalities (intersensory redundancy) selectively recruits attention and facilitates perceptual learning in human infants. This comparative study examined whether intersensory redundancy also facilitates perceptual learning prenatally. The authors assessed quail (Colinus virginianus) embryos' ability to learn a maternal call when it was (a) unimodal, (b) concurrent but asyn…
The development of infant intersensory perception
Despite impressive demonstrations of human infants' intersensory capabilities over the past several decades, there has been little focus on the contributions of prenatal and postnatal experience or the specific developmental processes underlying the emergence of intersensory functioning. Research with nonhuman animals has, however, provided a number of advances in understanding early intersensory perception. The authors explore the value of a com…
Intersensory experience and early perceptual development
Unlike the other sensory modalities of precocial infants, the visual modality does not normally become functional until after birth or hatching. Despite this unique developmental status, the role of emerging visual experience on postnatal perceptual organization remains unclear. In this study, bobwhite quail hatchlings were reared in conditions that manipulated postnatal experience with maternal visual cues, either alone or in conjunction with ma…
Evolving evolutionary psychology
Which evolutionary theory can best benefit psychological theory, research, and application? The most well-known school of evolutionary psychology has a narrow conceptual perspective (a.k.a., "Narrow Evolutionary Psychology" or NEP). Proponents of NEP have long argued that their brand of evolutionary psychology represents a full-fledged scientific revolution, with Buss (2020) recently likening NEP's scientific impact to that of a Copernican or Dar…
Theories of Attachment
Developmental Dynamics and Contemporary Evolutionary Psychology
The authors address commentaries by D. F. Bjorklund (2003); D. M. Buss and H. K. Reeve (2003); C. B. Crawford (2003); D. L. Krebs (2003); and J. Tooby, L. Cosmides, and H. C. Barrett (2003) on their analysis of the underlying assumptions of contemporary evolutionary psychology (R. Lickliter & H. Honeycutt, 2003). The authors argue that evolutionary psychology currently offers no coherent framework for how to integrate genetic, environmental, and …
The phylogeny fallacy
Context and Animal Behavior II
The young bird or mammal's natural situation is an inherently social one, in which the animal neonate receives an array of stimulation from its immediate surround- ings, especially its parent(s) and sibling(s). Like other aspects of the environment, social companions can be viewed as potential experiential resources for the developing individual, and can play a significant role in the realization of normal behavioral phenotypes. Only recently, ho…
Intersensory experience and early perceptual development
Related experiments examined the effects of attenuated prenatal sensory stimulation on subsequent postnatal auditory and visual responsiveness in precocial bobwhite quail chicks {Colinus virginianus). Results revealed that denying quail embryos the prenatal vestibular and tactile stimulation provided by broodmates during incubation alters pre- and postnatal perceptual functioning. Chicks incubated in physical isolation during the late stages of p…
Intersensory experience and early perceptual development
Unlike the other sensory modalities of precocial infants, the visual modality does not normally become functional until after birth or hatching. Despite this unique developmental status, the role of emerging visual experience on postnatal perceptual organization remains unclear. In this study, bobwhite quail hatchlings were reared in conditions that manipulated postnatal experience with maternal visual cues, either alone or in conjunction with ma…
The Ontogeny of Information
An Ecological Approach to Behavioral Development
In this article, I review recent work from comparative psychology, highlighting several conceptual and methodological insights drawn from comparative research and exploring their value to an ecological approach to behavioral development. In particular, I consider examples of a major focus of comparative psychology, the search for developmental mechanisms and processes underlying the expression of species-typical behavior. This focus has provided …
The development of infant intersensory perception
Intersensory redundancy guides attentional selectivity and perceptual learning in infancy
This study assessed an intersensory redundancy hypothesis, which holds that in early infancy information presented redundantly and in temporal synchrony across two sense modalities selectively recruits attention and facilitates perceptual differentiation more effectively than does the same information presented unimodally.Five-month-old infants' sensitivity to the amodal property of rhythm was examined in 3 experiments.Results revealed that habit…
The development of infant intersensory perception
Despite impressive demonstrations of human infants' intersensory capabilities over the past several decades, there has been little focus on the contributions of prenatal and postnatal experience or the specific developmental processes underlying the emergence of intersensory functioning. Research with nonhuman animals has, however, provided a number of advances in understanding early intersensory perception. The authors explore the value of a com…
The Salience of Multimodal Sensory Stimulation in Early Development
Studies of infant development concerned with the emergence of specific perceptual or cognitive abilities have typically focused on responsiveness in only one sensory modality. Research on infant perception, learning, and memory often attempts to reduce multimodal stimulation to “noise” and to control or omit stimulation from other sensory modalities in experimental designs. This type of unimodal research, although important, may not generalize we…
Intersensory redundancy facilitates prenatal perceptual learning in bobwhite quail (Colinus virginianus) embryos
Information presented redundantly and in temporal synchrony across sensory modalities (intersensory redundancy) selectively recruits attention and facilitates perceptual learning in human infants. This comparative study examined whether intersensory redundancy also facilitates perceptual learning prenatally. The authors assessed quail (Colinus virginianus) embryos' ability to learn a maternal call when it was (a) unimodal, (b) concurrent but asyn…
Developmental Dynamics and Contemporary Evolutionary Psychology
The authors address commentaries by D. F. Bjorklund (2003); D. M. Buss and H. K. Reeve (2003); C. B. Crawford (2003); D. L. Krebs (2003); and J. Tooby, L. Cosmides, and H. C. Barrett (2003) on their analysis of the underlying assumptions of contemporary evolutionary psychology (R. Lickliter & H. Honeycutt, 2003). The authors argue that evolutionary psychology currently offers no coherent framework for how to integrate genetic, environmental, and …
Developmental Dynamics
There has been a conceptual revolution in the biological sciences over the past several decades. Evidence from genetics, embryology, and developmental biology has converged to offer a more epigenetic, contingent, and dynamic view of how organisms develop. Despite these advances, arguments for the heuristic value of a gene-centered, predeterministic approach to the study of human behavior and development have become increasingly evident in the psy…
Intersensory Redundancy Enhances Memory in Bobwhite Quail Embryos
Information presented concurrently and redundantly to 2 or more senses (intersensory redundancy) has been shown to recruit attention and promote perceptual learning of amodal stimulus properties in animal embryos and human infants. This study examined whether the facilitative effect of intersensory redundancy also extends to the domain of memory. We assessed bobwhite quail chicks' ability to remember and prefer an individual maternal call present…
The Various Roles of Animal Models in Understanding Human Development
In this article, the authors take a very conservative view of the contribution of animal models to an understanding of human development. We do not think that homologies can be readily documented with even our most closely related relatives’ behavior and psychological functioning. The major contribution of animal models is their provision of food for thought (hypotheses, not facts) about human development and general principles of development, an…
Animal Models and Human Development
Up Versus Down
According to the intersensory redundancy hypothesis (IRH), during early development, perception of nonredundantly specified properties is facilitated in unimodal stimulation as compared with bimodal stimulation. Later in development, attention becomes more flexible and infants can detect nonredundantly specified properties in both unimodal and bimodal stimulation. This study tested these predictions by assessing the development of infants' sensit…
Thinking About Development
Gottlieb promoted the value of a developmental psychobiological systems approach to the study of human development. This approach recognizes the importance of comparative, animal-based research to advancing our understanding of the complexities and dynamics of the process of development. The major contribution of animal developmental studies is their provision of food for thought (hypotheses, not facts) about human development and general princip…
Theories of Attachment
The Fallacy of Partitioning
Ecological psychologists have long championed the importance of the concept of the organism-environment system and highlighted its value to our understanding of perception, action, and cognition (G
The Critical Role of Temporal Synchrony in the Salience of Intersensory Redundancy During Prenatal Development
We explored the amount and timing of temporal synchrony necessary to facilitate prenatal perceptual learning using an animal model, the bobwhite quail. Quail embryos were exposed to various audiovisual combinations of a bobwhite maternal call paired with patterned light during the late stages of prenatal development and were tested postnatally for evidence of prenatal auditory learning of the familiarized call. Results revealed that a maternal ca…
Exploring the dynamics of development and evolution
Blair and Raver (2012) have provided an organism-in-environment conceptualization of the development of stress response physiology and its relation to the development of self-regulation. They argue that we must consider the context in which self-regulation and stress reactivity occur to understand their implications for developmental outcome. More generally, they present a cogent argument for why it is necessary to think developmentally when cons…
The development of face perception in infancy
Although research has demonstrated impressive face perception skills of young infants, little attention has focused on conditions that enhance versus impair infant face perception. The present studies tested the prediction, generated from the intersensory redundancy hypothesis (IRH), that face discrimination, which relies on detection of visual featural information, would be impaired in the context of intersensory redundancy provided by audiovisu…
Intrasensory Redundancy Facilitates Infant Detection of Tempo
Research has demonstrated that intersensory redundancy (stimulation synchronized across multiple senses) is highly salient and facilitates processing of amodal properties in multimodal events, bootstrapping early perceptual development. The present study is the first to extend this central principle of the intersensory redundancy hypothesis ( IRH ) to certain types of intrasensory redundancy (stimulation synchronized within a single sense). Infan…
Integrating Development and Evolution in Psychological Science
New attempts in psychological science at integrating developmental (individual-level) and evolutionary (population-level) accounts of phenotypic stability and variability have achieved increasing prominence of late. Foremost among such attempts is the field of evolutionary developmental psychology (EDP). EDP proposes that selective pressures in evolution inform psychological development through a synthesis of the Darwinian/neo-Darwinian selection…
Psychology (33 works) · Developmental psychology (22 works) · Biology (20 works) · Cognitive science (19 works) · Neuroscience (18 works) · Cognitive psychology (16 works) · Perception (16 works) · Child and Animal Learning Development (14 works) · Computer Science (12 works) · Multisensory perception and integration (11 works)