For Parents

One of the major difficulties of revealing how infants and children are developing is figuring out how to do it because infants cannot tell you what they are thinking and will not push buttons on a computer in response to your questions (we know!  we've tried!).  Here are a few of the methods that we use to uncover the complexities of human development!  When we are investigating a research question, we select the research method that will best suit the question. 

Looking-While-Listening Procedure

In some of our studies, we watch kids do what they do naturally: look at things, listen to things, and move their eyes. These simple behaviors are actually very complex, and we can use them to answer all sorts of questions about how young children learn. In a typical study, children look at a big TV screen, view pairs of pictures (such as a dog and cat), and hear a sentence referring to one of the pictures (such as “Look at the doggy!”). We take a video of children’s eyes as they look and listen, which lets us see how quickly they can look at the correct picture. Studies usually last 4-8 minutes, and we choose pictures and sentence that are fun for kids. Here’s an example of an article we published that used the Looking-While-Listening Procedure.

Near Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS)

 Photo by: J.Adam Fenster

Near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is a brain-imaging technology that gives us a peek at the infant brain. It shines light onto a baby's head and the reflection of the light tells us about which parts of the brain are working as an infant is listening, looking or learning about the world around them!  Unlike other methods of measuring neural activity that require subjects to remain still (e.g., fMRI), NIRS can be used while young children are sitting upright and moving freely. The cap that infants wear is light-weight and comfortable.  They often don't even notice that it's there!  This technique is FDA-approved and involves less exposure to near-infrared light than walking from the car to a building on a sunny day. 

Vocabulary questionnaires

We often want to know how many words kids have learned at different ages. When you visit the lab, we may have you fill out the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory, a checklist containing hundreds of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and more. The questionnaire takes a little while to fill out, but our research assistants are here to entertain your kid(s) while you’re occupied. 

Headturn Preference Procedure

You’ve probably noticed that babies are very skilled at two things: focusing and getting bored. They look at something if they’re interested, and they look away if they don’t care. We are very interested in what makes babies UNinterested, because their boredom has the power to reveal a lot about development and learning. In the Headturn Preference Procedure, we teach babies that they get to hear something only if they turn their heads to look at a picture to their left or right. Babies quickly learn how to control these sounds in the experiment; when they look away, the sound stops. This allows us to measure how long babies care about listening to different things. For example, we could measure if they prefer listening to their own name vs. another kid’s name. Or, we could teach them new words, and see if they like some words better than others. 

Eye-Tracking

 Eye-tracking allows us to determine where on a computer screen a child’s gaze is fixated at any given moment. A monitor-mounted system works by reflecting a dim infrared light onto the eye and recording the reflection pattern with a sensor system. Geometric models are then used to calculate the baby’s exact point of gaze.