Current Studies We are currently running studies with children who are 3-5, 7-9, 11-14, 16, 18, 20, 22, and 26 months old. Sticky Mittens: Can infants who pick up balls with velcro mittens learn about causality earlier? In this study your baby will be given toy balls to play with while wearing mittens, and then watch a video. The mittens your infant will wear may or may not have Velcro on them. If the mittens have Velcro on them, this makes it easier for your child to pick up the balls and interact with them. What we are interested in seeing is whether the experience with being able to pick up the balls helps infants to form an understanding of how one object can act on another, causing it to move (we call this causality). When an infant is shown something over and over again, the amount of time he or she is willing to look at that stimulus goes down. By showing your child a video of one circle hitting another repeatedly, we can see how infants compare this causal action to other images with circles by how long your baby looks at the different images. This study is currently being conducted with 4- and 5-month olds Deduction, Deduction Static: Can infants deduce correlations between the looks of images and their type of motion? If infants learn that things with legs walk, and that things with legs have eyes, the connection can be made that things with eyes walk. This study aims to determine whether or not infants can engage in this kind of reasoning. Your baby will be shown videos of a square and a circle, each doing a specific motion (bouncing or jumping). Your infant will also be shown still images of a square and circle. One of the shapes has a cross on it, and the other will have a heart on it. We will show your infant these images over and over again until he or she learns them, and is no longer interested in looking at them. After your baby learns these images, we will show him or her three more pictures. Two were new muffin shapes, one with a cross on it and one with a heart on it, and they will each be either bouncing or jumping. The third image was either a circle or a square engaging in a different motion than your child previously saw. Once infants learn the kind of motion that goes with a shape, and the kind of picture (cross or heart) associated with that shape, we are interested in knowing at what age infants can make the connection between the picture on the shape and the motion of the shape. Depending on how long your infant looks at these last three images, we can determine the age group that can use this kind of deductive reasoning. This study is currently being conducted with 8-, 11-, 14-, 20-, and 26-month-olds Paired Associations with Predators: Will infants learn emotional responses associated with predators more quickly than with non-predators? In this study your infant will be shown an image of a potentially harmful animal (a snake or a spider) or a non-threatening object (a flower or mushroom) paired with either faces or shapes. We will then show your child a pairing they had not seen before: for example, a flower with a smiling face if they had previously seen a snake with a smiling face. We are examining whether infants learn more quickly to make associations with harmful animals than with non-threatening objects. If so, this would provide evidence that humans are "prepared" by evolution to quickly learn the appropriate emotional responses to certain stimuli. This study is currently being conducted with 7-month-olds, 11-month-olds Generalizing Agency to a Self-Propelled Object with Moving Parts Do infants expect self-propelled objects with moving parts to cause other objects to move? In this study your infant will watch a video in which a single colored square with a moving part begins to move on its own. After your baby watches these movies many times, we will show him or her a video in which the square bumps into a new object, causing it to move, and a second movie where these roles are reversed. We are interested in how long your baby looks at these new events. Are babies surprised when things that formerly moved on their own now need to be pushed into motion? This study is currently being conducted with 14-month-olds Correlations of Moving Parts In this study, your infant will be shown videos of two moving objects each of which has two moving parts: one that moves all of the time and one that only moves when each object moves. Once your child no longer finds these interesting, three new objects will be shown that have different combinations of previously seen parts and object movements. We are interested in seeing how infants learn associations between moving parts and movements of whole objects. This is important for being able to learn how real-life objects move: for example, although people’s arms and legs move when they walk, it is only the legs that are associated with the walking and not the arms. This experiment is currently being conducted with 18- and 22-month-olds. Sequential Touching of Parts In this study, your infant will be given groups of objects to play with that could be categorized in one of two ways: either by overall structure or by the parts that the objects have. The objects vary with respect to how much the parts stand out – for some objects the parts are large and are painted a different color from the body; for other objects, these are small and painted the same color as the body. We are interested in seeing when infants will use parts as a basis for categorization, and when they will use overall structure. We assess categorization by systematic touching of objects from the same category. This experiment is currently being conducted with 16- and 20-month-olds. Infant Cognition Laboratory Department of Psychology Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3890 (412) 268-6122 cmu.icl@gmail.com www.psy.cmu.edu/~rakison/labpage.html