Home
FAQ
Current Studies
Contact Us
Directions
Research Team
Related Labs
Babies in the News
Publications

How do children develop? At the Northwestern University Infant Cognition Laboratory, we study how children learn to perceive and reason about the world around them. Our studies have shown that babies know much more than people once thought. We study topics like how infants remember objects, how children learn new words, how babies and children understand numbers, and more.

What we do is quite simple. In an infant study, babies are seated on their parent's lap and presented with displays consisting of objects or people. All we do is measure how long he or she spends looking at each display. Since babies typically look longer at things that they find new or surprising, we can make inferences about how babies perceive and understand our displays by examining general patterns of looking across a number of infants. With older children, the studies typically involve playing with small, countable objects or learning names for novel toys.

Parents will stay in the room with their child at all times, and if parents have other children who would like to come along, we provide toys and baby-sitters for them as well. Although many families choose to come in several times to participate in different studies, participation in one study requires just one visit and does not commit families to any other visits. Each study takes about fifteen minutes, but parents should plan on a thirty minute visit so that we have time to explain the study further and discuss its findings with them.

We are looking for children of many ages to participate!

• Most studies involve only 1 visit, and the average session lasts only 30 minutes
• Babies will be sitting in mom's or dad's lap the entire time
• Babies will receive a t-shirt or toy for participating
• Children find our studies fun and so do parents!

Home | FAQ | Current Studies | Contact Us | Directions | Research Team | Related Labs | Babies in the News | Publications

Department of Psychology | Northwestern University Home | Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences