We are pleased to announce that professor Andy Bremner will speak at our next BRC Colloquium on January 22nd in 2026!
What’s it like being a baby: the free-floating baby hypothesis
Andy Bremner, Centre for Developmental Science, School of Psychology, University of Birmingham
“Human babies cannot tell us about their experiences and are uncooperative (to say the least) when it comes to following instructions in experiments they are participating in. I will describe the window which developmental psychology has opened onto sensory abilities and experiences at the start of life. I will argue that when we shift our focus beyond vision and hearing to consider the full gamut of early embodied sensory experience (e.g., mediated by crossmodal interactions with touch), evidence indicates that young infants may have a strikingly different experience of their own bodies and their place in the external environment, leading to the proposal that young infants’ experience of themselves could be described as “free-floating”. As well as attempting to shed light on how bodily experience is constructed in neurotypical infants, I will also explain some of the recent insights which we are gaining from infants with very different early experiences – for instance when born without vision.”
Hybrid meeting
This meeting will be a hybrid meeting. We encourage everyone to join us in person at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (room 163). If you wish to join online, please click on this zoom-link (meeting ID: 652 2181 054; Passcode: 58463)