When I first came in contact with Developmental Psychology during my Bachelor of Psychology, I immediately started marveling at all the creative ways psychologists set out to understand the kaleidoscopic minds of babies and children. Understanding children and babies from an adult’s perspective can be challenging. But bridging the gap between our two worlds is absolutely central to ensuring babies and children’s health, happiness and safety- it can also teach us a lot about who we are as adults!
To gather more experience in the field of developmental psychology I’m currently doing an internship at the Babylab where I’m supporting Elin and Rosalie on their research on Habituation, exploring how babies respond and adapt to different stimuli.
In this study, we focus on the simplest form of learning: habituation. Habituation is the ability to get used to repeated or continuous stimuli. Previous research has shown that there are significant differences in the way infants habituate. This could potentially be explained by individual differences in temperament and/or stimulus complexity.
To investigate this, we have infants aged 5 to 12 months watch a screen displaying alternating complex and simple images. By measuring the infants’ viewing behavior, we can determine if they respond differently to complex images compared to simple ones. In addition to observing viewing behavior, we use a questionnaire to assess the infants’ temperament. By linking the results of this questionnaire to the habituation data, we can examine if there is a relationship between temperament and the way infants habituate. The experiment takes approximately 10-15 minutes.
As a bachelor’s student in Psychobiology, I am very interested in the brain. During my studies, I discovered that, in addition to the brain, I am also fascinated by the development of (young) children. Besides my studies, I spend a lot of time babysitting, and there is nothing I enjoy more than seeing how much the children develop in the short period I haven’t seen them. To conclude my bachelor’s degree, I am currently doing an internship at the Babylab in Amsterdam, a place that perfectly aligns with my interests. I am working on the Habituation research, where we use eye tracking to measure and investigate forms of attention and learning.
As a bachelor’s student in Psychobiology and Psychology, I am interested in the brain and human behavior. I find it fascinating to study how these two aspects rapidly develop during early childhood. Therefore, for my bachelor’s project, I am participating in the Habituation research, where we are investigating how babies learn and what factors influence this process.
The habituation paradigm is among the most ubiquitous methods for studying infant cognition. Yet, the choice of appropriate experimental design parameters can be hard to justify from previous work and often has unknown consequences for the primary outcomes of interest. Our goal is to perform a large-scale collaborative systematic review and meta-analysis, in which we describe the experimental design and reporting practices over the past 20 years of the infant habituation paradigm and weigh the impact of potentially arbitrary methodological design choices on the strength of the novelty effect. The Stage 1 Registered Report for this review just received in principle acceptance to the special issue on Open Science and Metascience in Developmental Psychology at the journal of Infant and Child Development. We are launching the data collection this spring and are welcoming new contributors to join our data extraction team!
Thus far, we have screened the literature for suitable papers, developed a coding scheme, and built a crowd-sourced workflow for coding the papers. We are inviting and offering authorship for: 1) individual contributors in exchange for 25 usable papers (+ some training), and 2) lab contributions in exchange for 50 usable papers (+ some training per participating lab member). We further hope to create opportunities for student projects and participating labs to pursue additional research questions using (part of) our dataset. At later stages of the project, contributions will be also welcome at other project levels (e.g., writing, analyses, etc.). For more information and status updates, please sign up for our mailing list and join our Slack group! You can reach out with additional questions regarding this project to Martina Zaharieva (m.zaharieva@uva.nl) and Simon Kucharský (s.kucharsky@uva.nl), University of Amsterdam.
How do babies learn? The ability to learn rules is at the heart of human cognition, essential for things like language, playing chess, and solving problems. But when do we develop this ability? Can babies already learn rules?
Together with labs across the world, we here at the University of Amsterdam are starting the exciting ManyBabies 3 project to answer these questions. We will present 5 to 12 month old babies with recordings of syllable sounds. Meanwhile, we observe their eye movements and head-turn behavior to gain a deeper understanding into whether babies use rules to learn languages. The study takes approximately 15 minutes.
Would you like to join our fun experiment with your baby to investigate social evaluation in infants?
Evaluating others is a crucial aspect of adult life, but do infants have the same ability to socially evaluate? As part of the ManyBabies 4 project, we are investigating whether infants between 5.5 and 10.5 months prefer prosocial over antisocial characters. To study this, we let infants watch a fun videotaped puppet show involving a helper and a hinderer. To understand how they evaluate the characters, we then measure which of the characters they prefer by observing which character they reach for. The study takes approximately 15-30 minutes. Feel free to contact us for further information and sign up!
At the very core of humanity lies the ability to mentalise – to comprehend that other people have their own thoughts and feelings, intentions and knowledge. But when exactly does this capacity develop in us? We are one of more than 20 labs around the world exploring this fundamental question in developmental psychology as part of the ManyBabies 2 (MB2) collaborative project. In this study, we let both infants aged 18 to 27 months and adults watch short animated films. Meanwhile, we measure their looking behavior. This way, we gain insight into their understanding of what others know. The study takes approximately 15 minutes.
I think human minds are fascinating, especially in the first couple of years of our lives when cognitive abilities develop. There are so many different skills we learn from a very young age that are crucial for us for the rest of our lives. As a research master’s student in developmental psychology and cognition, I’m looking forward to discovering more about infants’ cognitive development. I am part of the ManyBabies 3 project looking into rule learning abilities in infants.
Would you like to help us investigate how babies learn language? We’re running two fun experiments your babies will enjoy! Did you know that even before babies speak their first words, they are working hard to also learn the grammatical rules of their language(s)? In this study, we let 7 month old babies listen to a novel language. After a brief listening phase, we measure their looking behaviour. In this way we can understand how well they learned the rules in the language. We also investigate whether multilingual babies are better at learning these rules. The study takes approximately 15 minutes, and babies with every language background can participate. Get in touch with us for more information and sign ups!
