Emeritus Professor

Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience

Office: 528 Wilson Hall
Phone: (615) 322-0052
Fax: (615) 343-0449
Email: 

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Degrees

• Ph.D., University of Minnesota, 1963.

Research Area

• The objective of Odom's research is to determine the course of early cognitive development, with special interest in determining the independent and interactive roles of perception and conception. The approach is designed to identify certain perceptual characteristics (e.g., salience) of task information and to assess their effects on performance in problems that require developmentally important conceptual abilities. Examples of conceptual abilities under investigation are metamemory and various classificatory rules. Other research is designed to explore issues about integral and separable perception, the central question being whether there is a qualitative shift in the course of development from integral, holistic perception to separable perception.

Representative Publications

• Cunningham, J. G., & Odom, R. D. (1986). Differential salience of facial features in children's perception of affective expression. Child Development, 57, 136-142.
• Cook, G. L., & Odom, R. D. (1988). Perceptual sensitivity to dimensional and similarity relations in free and rule-governed classifications. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 45, 319-338.
• Cook, G. L., & Odom, R. D. (1992). Perception of multidimensional stimuli: A differential-sensitivity account of cognitive processing and development. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 54, 213-249.
• Odom, R.D., & Cook, G.L. (1996). Valuing of identity, distribution of attention, and perceptual salience in free and rule-governed classifications. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 61, 173-189.