"The tour ended at the Hank Virtual Environments Lab in MacLean Hall, where Jodie Plumert, professor and Starch Faculty Fellow in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, and Joe Kearney, interim dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and professor in the Department of Computer Science, demonstrated their work on child safety, which has received national attention and was featured on Good Morning America.

The virtual environments Plumert and Kearney can produce in the lab have yielded insights into why children struggle to cross busy streets safely, finding that a child’s perceptual judgment and motor skills are not fully developed until the age of 14.