Emily W. Bushnell (born 1950) is an American psychologist and

emeritus professor ''Emeritus'' (; female: ''emerita'') is an adjective used to designate a retired chair, professor, pastor, bishop, pope, director, president, prime minister, rabbi, emperor, or other person who has been "permitted to retain as an honorary title ...

psychology Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Psychology includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts. It is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries betwe ...

Tufts University Tufts University is a private research university on the border of Medford and Somerville, Massachusetts. It was founded in 1852 as Tufts College by Christian universalists who sought to provide a nonsectarian institution of higher learnin ...

in Medford,

Massachusetts Massachusetts (Massachusett language, Massachusett: ''Muhsachuweesut assachusett writing systems, məhswatʃəwiːsət'' English: , ), officially the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, is the most populous U.S. state, state in the New England ...

, USA. Her areas of professional interest include

child development Child development involves the Human development (biology), biological, developmental psychology, psychological and emotional changes that occur in human beings between birth and the conclusion of adolescence. Childhood is divided into 3 stages o ...

, infant

perception Perception () is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment. All perception involves signals that go through the nervous system, ...

haptic perception Haptic perception ( gr, haptόs, script=latn, italics=yes "palpable", ''haptikόs'' "suitable for touch") means literally the ability "to grasp something". Perception in this case is achieved through the active exploration of surfaces and objects ...

and acquisition of perceptual-motor skills. Professor Bushnell received her

Ph.D. A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is a ...

in Developmental Psychology from the

University of Minnesota The University of Minnesota, formally the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, (UMN Twin Cities, the U of M, or Minnesota) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in the Minneapolis–Saint Paul, Tw ...

in 1979 and a BA in psychology from Swarthmore College in 1972. She served as chair of the Tufts Psychology Department from 1993 to 1996 and sat on the editorial board of the journal ''Child Development''.

Representative publications

* Bushnell, E. W., and Boudreau, J. P. (1998) "Exploring and exploiting objects with the hands during infancy" in K. Connolly (Ed.), ''The Psychobiology of the Hand'', pp. 144–161, Cambridge, UK: Mac Keith Press. * Bushnell, E. W., and Baxt, C. (1999) "Children’s haptic and cross-modal recognition with familiar and unfamiliar objects", ''Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance'', 25, pp. 1867–1881. * Roder, B. J., Bushnell, E. W., and Sasseville, A. M. (2000). "Infants preferences for familiarity and novelty during the course of visual processing", ''Infancy'', 1, pp. 491–507. * Striano, T., and Bushnell, E. W. (2005). "Haptic perception of material properties by 3-month-old infants", ''Infant Behavior and Development'', 28, pp. 266–289.

References

1950 births Living people 21st-century American women 21st-century American psychologists American women academics American women psychologists Swarthmore College alumni Tufts University faculty University of Minnesota College of Education and Human Development alumni 20th-century American psychologists {{US-psychologist-stub