Faculty

JOHN COLOMBO
Professor, Department of Psychology
Member, Cognitive Program
Member, Developmental Program
Director, Schiefelbusch Institute for Life Span Studies
Director, Kansas Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Center
Co-Investigator, Center for Behavioral Neuroscience in Communicative Disorders
Faculty Chair, Human Subjects Committee - Lawrence
Ph.D., 1981, State University of New York at Buffalo
colombo@ku.edu
VITA

Related Links
Cognitive Psychology Program
Developmental Psychology Program
Personal Website
Life Span Institute
Center for the Behavioral Neuroscience of Communicative Disorders
Human Subjects Committee, Lawrence

Research Interests
My research interests are in the area of developmental cognitive neuroscience. My research program specifically involves the development of attention, learning, and memory, and the manner in which these components are integrated to serve higher-order functions. This topic has spawned several lines of research. There is continuing work done on the developmental cognitive neuroscience of attention in typically-developing infants and toddlers (arousal, spatial orienting, object recognition, and the emergence of integrated cognition/executive processes) that involves behavioral paradigms augmented with psychophysiological measures, free-play protocols, and eye-tracking systems. Another line of work seeks to apply measures of early cognition for the early identification of infants and children at risk for cognitive/language delays or psychopathology. A third focus highlights the use of these measures as short-term outcomes for evaluating the effect of environmental (e.g., SES, maternal interactive style) or organismic (e.g., nutritional status) manipulations and factors on developmental outcome. These research programs are served by both observational studies and clinical trials. We maintain laboratory sites at the University of Kansas Edwards Campus in Overland Park, the University of Kansas Medical Center in Kansas City, and at the Wakarusa Research Facility in Lawrence. Our work has been supported by funds from NIH, NSF, and industry.

Selected Publications

Colombo, J. (1982). The critical period concept: Research, methodology, and conceptual issues. Psychological Bulletin, 92, 260 275. (PMID: 7071261)

Colombo, J., Mitchell, D. W., O'Brien, M., and Horowitz, F. D. (1987). Stability of infant visual habituation during the first year. Child Development, 58, 474 489. (PMID: 3829788)

Colombo, J., and Fagen, J. W. (Eds., 1990). Individual differences in infancy: Reliability, stability, and prediction. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum and Associates.

Colombo, J., Mitchell, D. W., Coldren, J. T., and Freeseman, L. J. (1991). Individual differences in infant attention: Are short lookers faster processors or feature processors? Child Development, 62, 1247-1257. (PMID: 1786713)

Colombo, J. (1993). Infant cognition: Predicting later intellectual functioning. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, Inc.

Colombo, J. (1995). On the neural mechanisms underlying developmental and individual differences in infant fixation duration: Two hypotheses. Developmental Review, 15, 97-135.

Colombo, J., Ryther, J. S., Frick, J. E., & Gifford, J. J. (1995). A visual "pop-out" effect in infants: Evidence for preattentive search in 3- and 4-month-olds. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 2, 266-268.

Colombo, J. (1995). Cost, utility, and the judgments of institutional review boards. Psychological Science, 6, 318-319. Frick, J.E.,

Colombo, J., & Saxon, T. F. (1999). Individual and developmental differences in disengagement of fixation in early infancy. Child Development 70, 537-548. (PMID: 10368908)

Colombo, J. (2001). The development of visual attention in infancy. Annual Review of Psychology, 52, 337-367. (PMID: 11148309)

Colombo, J. (2002). Infant attention grows up: The emergence of a developmental cognitive neuroscience perspective. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 11, 196-199.

Colombo, J., Shaddy, D. J., Richman, W. A., Maikranz, J. M., & Blaga, O. (2004). Developmental course of visual habituation and preschool cognitive and language outcome. Infancy, 5, 1-38.

Colombo, J., Kannass, K. N., Shaddy, D. J., Kundurthi, S., Anderson, C. J., Blaga, O. M., & Carlson, S. E. (2004). Maternal DHA and the development of attention in infancy and toddlerhood. Child Development, 75, 1254-1267. (PMID: 15260876)

Anderson, C.J., & Colombo, J. (2006). Pupillary responses and visual scanning in children with autism spectrum disorder. Journal of Clinical and Experimental Neuropsychology, 28, 1238-1256. (PMID: 16840248)

Kannass, K.N., & Colombo, J. (2007). The effects of continuous and intermittent distractors on cognitive performance and attention in preschoolers. Journal of Cognitive Development, 8, 63-78.

Blaga, O.M., Anderson, C. J., Shaddy, D. J., Kannass, K. N., Little, T. D., & Colombo, J. (2009). Structure and continuity of intelligence during early childhood. Intelligence, 37, 106-113

Anderson, C. J., & Colombo, J. (2009). Larger tonic pupil size in young children with autism spectrum disorder. Developmental Psychobiology, 51, 207-211. (PMID: 18988196).

Colombo, J., & Mitchell, D. W. (2009). Infant visual habituation. Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, 92, 225-234. (PMID: 18620070)

Rankin, C., Abrams, T., Barry, R., Bhatnagar, S., Cerruti, D., Fang, C.-W., Clayton, D., Colombo, J., Coppola, G., Geyer, M., Glanzman, D., Marsland, S., McSweeney, F., Wilson, D., & Thompson, R. (2009). Habituation: An evaluation and revision of Thompson and Spencer (1966). Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, 92, 135-138. (PMID: 18854219)

Colombo, J., McCardle, P., & Freund, L. (Eds., 2009). Infant pathways to language: Methods, models, and research directions. New York, NY: Psychology Press/Taylor and Francis.al attention in infancy. Annual Review of Psychology, 52, 337-367.