At Lancaster's Infant and Child Development Lab, we have a whole host of studies available for you and your child(ren) to participate in. Our studies change frequently, so if there isn't anything suitable for you to take part in at the moment, be sure to check back in a couple of months when we will have a fresh range of experiments in need of participants!
We conduct a wide variety of different studies in the Infant and Child Development Lab - here are a few you might be able to get involved with.
A big part of using tools correctly is holding them properly. Do babies learn how to hold everyday tools like cups by watching adults? We show them pictures of people reaching for and holding cups in normal and strange ways. The pattern of babies’ brain waves can tell us if the baby predicted that the person would hold the cup normally.
We present infants with real moving objects that disappear behind a stationary object in its path. Infants are then presented with possible and impossible events when the stationary object is removed. We are interested in whether infants understand that a moving object still exists when it disappears behind other objects.
Infants’ category formation underpins language learning. We are interested in how infants group objects together into different categories such as cats and dogs using sounds and visual characteristics. We also look at how children begin to learn words for these categories using pointing games and eye-tracking studies.
We investigate communication between an infant and their social partner. We study how infants learn that we are communicating with them using eye contact and calling their name, and how this helps them to learn information such as object labels, categories and symbols.
Soon after birth, babies can read emotions based on the face, body posture, and tone of voice. To understand how these abilities develop, we present infants with pictures or videos of adults and children expressing different emotions and record the babies’ brain responses and their eye-gaze.
Pictures are a rich source of information that humans use to communicate with each other. When do children understand that pictures are symbolic and refer to something in the real world? How does this interact with language? We investigate these questions in toddlers and children with Autism Spectrum Disorder.
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