Lauren Adamson

Lauren Bernstein Adamson (June 21, 1948 – December 31, 2021) was an American developmental psychologist known for her research on communicative development, parent-child interaction, and joint attention in infants with typical and atypical developmental trajectories. She was a Regents' Professor Emerita of Psychology at Georgia State University.

Adamson was a Fellow of the American Psychological Association (Division 7, Developmental Psychology) and also a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science. She was the author of the book Communication Development During Infancy and co-editor of Communication and Language Acquisition: Discoveries from Atypical Development (with Mary Ann Romski).

Early life and education

Lauren Bernstein was born in Saranac Lake, New York, and grew up in Milford, Connecticut. a widely used assessment of young infants' reactions to the sudden unresponsiveness of an adult during face-to-face interaction.

Adamson joined the Faculty of Psychology at Georgia State University in 1980 where she remained until her retirement in 2015. She served as Dean of its College of Arts and Sciences from 2003 to 2011.

Research Adamson's research program focused on the development of engagement of infants and young children with their social partners. She conducted collaborative research with Roger Bakeman and others in which they monitored the behaviors of infants during social engagements with their caregivers and peers to track the development of joint attention skills. Their studies focused on shared attention to objects, displays of emotion, and occurrence of gestures and words. In all instances, infants exhibited more complex forms of social engagement with their mothers than with peers at young ages, underscoring the role of caregivers in scaffolding (supporting) infants' attention to objects and people. Adamson and her colleagues extended this line of research by monitoring joint engagement in populations with atypical development. Their aim was to see how variation in patterns of joint engagement might impact language developmental trajectories of children with ASD and Down syndrome.

Adamson and her colleagues also conducted intervention studies to support children's language development. One of their co-authored articles "Randomized Comparison of Augmented and Nonaugmented Language Interventions for Toddlers With Developmental Delays and Their Parents" received the ASHA Editor's Award for best paper published in 2010 in the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research. The research concluded that augmented communication was more beneficial in supporting vocabulary development in children with developmental delays than interventions that used only spoken communication.

Representative publications

Adamson, L. B., Bakeman, R., & Deckner, D. F. (2004). The development of symbol‐infused joint engagement. Child Development, 75(4), 1171–1187. Adamson, L. B., Bakeman, R., Deckner, D. F., & Romski, M. (2009). Joint engagement and the emergence of language in children with autism and Down syndrome. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 39(1), 84–96. Adamson, L. B., & Frick, J. E. (2003). The still face: A history of a shared experimental paradigm. Infancy, 4(4), 451–473. Bakeman, R., & Adamson, L. B. (1984). Coordinating attention to people and objects in mother-infant and peer-infant interaction. Child Development, 55(4), 1278–1289. Barr, R. G., Konner, M., Bakeman, R., & Adamson, L. (1991). Crying in! Kung San infants: A test of the cultural specificity hypothesis. Developmental Medicine & Child Neurology, 33(7), 601–610. Tronick, E., Als, H., Adamson, L., Wise, S., & Brazelton, T. B. (1978). The infant's response to entrapment between contradictory messages in face-to-face interaction. Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry, 17(1), 1–13.