As a master’s student in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences program with a background in Psychology, I have always been fascinated by how the human mind develops from the very first moments of life. My curiosity about developmental psychology drives me to explore how infants perceive and adapt to the world around them. Spending time with children, especially babies, has deepened my appreciation for their rapid growth and learning. To gain experience in this field, I am joining the Babylab as a volunteer, contributing to the Habituation research, where we use eye tracking to measure different aspects of attention and learning.
Ever since my first lecture in Developmental Psychology during the first year of my Psychology Bachelor’s program, I became fascinated by early development in infants. I am especially interested in how infants explore the world around them and interact with other people, as these early experiences can be crucial in shaping future development in childhood and later in life.
This semester I will be participating in the ongoing study on infant habituation in the Babylab.
Babies deserve their status as some of the most fascinating creatures to study. What I find most interesting is the connection between brain and behaviour — how cognitive processes shape our actions and how, in turn, our experiences shape cognition. By studying the tiny, yet rapidly growing infant mind, we are able to get a glimpse into how early experiences shape the way we think, see the world, and interact with it right from the start!
I will be supporting the Babylab’s research on infant habituation, where we investigate how infants adapt to new stimuli through eye-tracking.
Hello! My name is Diana Valero, and I’m a third-year psychology student specializing in clinical developmental psychology. I’ve always been curious about how children and infants process new experiences and how their little minds adapt over time. There are so many things to learn about the world when you are an infant, how is it possible that a tiny human being can grow up to be a functioning adult? What are the mechanisms that develop our thinking?
Research can help us find answers, or at least point us towards the right direction, in understanding the mysteries of the infant mind. This semester, I’ll be helping out at the baby lab with the ongoing research on infant habituation, which investigates how infants respond to new stimuli and what factors influence this learning. I look forward to meeting you all!
This is me, Jacoline Blankenstijn, a student of psychobiology and psychology with a deep interest in everything related to the brain, development, and behavior. What fascinates me most is the immense number of changes that take place in a baby’s brain. Infancy lays the foundation for everything that follows—the very core of who we become. That’s why the research conducted at Babylab Amsterdam is so valuable and incredibly interesting!
During the final phase of my bachelor’s degree, I am doing an internship here, contributing to the Habituation study. This research helps us understand how babies respond to stimuli, how they learn, and how they differ from one another in these learning processes.
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.
