Karl Rosengren

The focus of my work is on change: How children think about changes in the world surrounding them and how children and adults adapt to changes in their local environment in order to act safely and effectively. These topics divide into three lines of research: - Children's Reasoning and Conceptual Development I have long been fascinated with how children reason about objects and events in the world and how they can differentiate between things that are possible in the real world with those that aren't. This let me to examine children's understanding magic, fantasy, biological changes such as growth and metamorphosis, and children's understanding of death - Motor Development and Control In the motor domain, I have primarily been interested in how children and adults maintain balance and effectively more through the world. I have conducted research on how children and adults control their balance, how specific experiences such as learning T'ai chi lead to improvements in the way older adults more, and how factors such as the equipment and fatigue influence firefighters' balance and walking. - Interaction of Cognitive and Motor Development Most behavior emerges from the complex interaction of different factors with the individual child, the task they are confronted with, and then the environment they are in. I have two lines of research that look at how cognitive and motor development interact over childhood. The first area focusing on children's action errors - where young children (and sometimes adults!) attempt to perform an action on an object that cannot be successfully completed because the object is too small (scale error), the object is depicted in a photograph (grasping error), or the object is available on digital media (media errors). The second area focuses on the development of children's drawings. Children's drawings have long been used in a wide range of assessments, focusing primarily on the final drawing. My work investigates the underlying processes that influence the final product.