Category: News

Great news! As of this month, Babylab Amsterdam is actively recruiting babies again for our habituation study. We’re collecting new data to learn more about how babies learn and develop.

New team

We’re excited to welcome two enthusiastic new research interns who are fully dedicated to this study: Lisa and Ilse. Over the coming period, they’ll be working hard on conducting the studies and collecting valuable data.

Will Your Baby Participate?

We’re looking for babies aged 5 to 12 months to participate in our habituation study. Habituation is the simplest form of learning: the ability to get used to repeated or continuous stimuli. By studying this, we learn more about individual differences in how babies learn and develop.

What to Expect?

• A visit takes between 30 minutes and 1 hour
• The task itself only takes 5 to 10 minutes
• You stay with your baby the entire time
• Tasks are specially designed to be attractive and fun for babies
• Travel expenses are reimbursed

Our main goal? Making sure you and your baby have a great time at our lab. You can quit the experiment any time. The safety and comfort of you both comes first.

Sign Up!

Would you like to participate in our research with your baby and contribute to science? We’d love to hear from you!

Contact
e-mail: info@babylabamsterdam.nl

We’re looking forward to meeting you,

Team babylab Amsterdam

Habituation is the decrease in attention to repeated stimuli, which we study by observing babies’ looking behaviour. This process helps babies and young children learn to distinguish between important and less important stimuli in their environment.

In this study, we also measure the baby’s pupil size. In an exploratory analysis, we want to examine whether there is a relationship between pupil size and looking behavior. But why is this relevant?

The pupil doesn’t just respond to changes in light, but also to attention and mental effort. So when a baby pays less attention to a stimulus (i.e., habituates), we expect this to be reflected in a change in pupil size. In this way, pupil size might serve as an objective measure of what is going on in the baby’s brain.

If we better understand the relationship between pupil size and habituation, we can apply this knowledge in future research — for example, in studies on autism spectrum disorder (ASD), anxiety disorders, and in general research involving individuals who are non-verbal, such as infants or people with communication difficulties.

We are looking for parents who would like to contribute to our habituation study. Interested in participating? You can sign up via the ‘Participate’ page! 

This June marks the end of the Habituation Project at BabyLab Amsterdam, and we’re excited to share that a total of 51 babies took part in the study — an incredible achievement!

On behalf of the whole team, we would like to extend a heartfelt thank you for everyone’s support and participation in our study.

We wanted to share what we found from preliminary analysis of some of the data. Please note that this is an early look at the data — the full dataset will be further analyzed and used for future academic publication.

WHAT WAS OUR STUDY ABOUT?

In this project, we studied infant habituation—how babies gradually lose interest in repeated sights or sounds—and what factors influence this learning process. Habituation is key to understanding early attention, memory, and cognitive development, especially since infants can’t communicate directly.

Temperament is a baby’s natural style of behaving and reacting to things — like how active they are, how easily they get upset or how they respond to new people and was measured with the questionnaire you filled out. 

Stimulus complexity was explored using colorful, moving (complex) versus black-and-white, still (simple) images and tracking how long babies looked at them.

In addition to tracking where babies looked, we also measured pupil size, which can reflect mental effort or interest.

PRELIMINARY RESULTS

Habituation

On average, infants demonstrated habituation to the stimuli, as expected. This means that with repeated exposure, they were able to process the familiar stimuli more quickly and spent less time looking at them. When new stimuli were introduced, the infants showed renewed interest by looking longer at the unfamiliar images. This pattern of responses suggests that infants are actively learning from and responding to their environment.

Stimulus Complexity

There were no major differences in how quickly infants lost interest (habituated) to simple vs. complex images. Surprisingly, some infants looked longer at the simple images, suggesting these might have held their attention more than expected!

Temperament

While we saw some patterns (for example, babies who are more sensitive showed faster habituation), the findings weren’t strong enough to draw firm conclusions.

Pupil Size

While babies did look less over time (a sign of learning), their pupils didn’t consistently get smaller — sometimes they even got bigger. This suggests that pupil size may capture more complex reactions than we expected, and needs further study.

In a recent BabyLab Amsterdam Project, we investigated infant habituation and what factors can affect this learning process.

But, what is habituation, and why does it matter?

Infant habituation is a vital learning process where babies gradually show less interest in something they’ve seen or heard before.

It’s like baby gets when your baby gets bored after playing with it for a while.

Studying habituation in infants is important because it gives insight into how early learning, memory, and attention develop. Through research, we can better understand how infants learn and how to support their cognitive and sensory development.

Moreover, because infants cannot communicate with us, many studies use habituation in their paradigms as way of assessing whether the child can discriminate between stimuli . Thanks to this, researchers have discovered that infants can tell the difference between musical excerpts, recognise and discriminate between faces at an early age, and assess their memory performance on tasks. However, a big challenge in this paradigm is that not all babies respond or habituate in the same way, highlighting the importance of more research on this concept.

Read more about our research on habituation in the Projects page!