Lauren Adamson

Lauren Bernstein Adamson (born 1948) in Saranac Lake, New York is a developmental psychologist known for her research on communicative development, parent-child interaction, and joint attention in infants with typical and atypical developmental trajectories. She is the Regents' Professor Emerita of Psychology at Georgia State University.
Adamson is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association (Division 7, Developmental Psychology) and also a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science. She is 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).
Biography.
Adamson received her B.A. in Psychology, with minors in Biology and Sociology, from Swarthmore College in 1970. She then attended the University of California, Berkeley where she completed her M.A. in Psychology in 1972 and her Ph.D. in Psychology in 1977. Early in her career as a Research Scientist at Children's Medical Center, Boston, she gained experience in infancy research working with Edward Tronick, Heidelise Als, and T. Berry Brazelton. This research team developed the still face paradigm, 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 has remained throughout her career. She served as Dean its College of Arts and Sciences y from 2003–2011. Her work has been funded by numerous grants from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institute of Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, National Science Foundation, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, and Autism Speaks.
She is married to Walter L. Adamson, the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History at Emory University.
Research.
Adamson's research program has focused on the development of engagement of infants and young children with their social partners. She has 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 have 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.