Babylab News – Infant & Child Cognition Lab

Spring has sprung!

Happy spring! 🌱 We are all excited to keep having families visit as the temperatures (however inconsistently) start to rise and the buds start to peep out.

As snows melt, we can think about how infants and young children reason about liquids and solids. Do they think of snow as similar to sand? Does it make sense that white snow turns into clear water?

As we start playing outside more frequently, are babies able to keep track of hidden items, like in a treasure hunt?

Research assistant Maria Flanders investigated the properties of water from a hose several years ago

Enjoy watching your child scientists explore the world, and fill out the contact form if you are interested in joining us in the lab to participate in our studies!

Research Assistant’s Future Plans Falling Into Place

Congratulations! Research assistant Maria Flanders (Mount Holyoke College class of 2018) has been accepted into the Masters of Arts in Teaching program at Mount Holyoke College, with a concentration in early childhood education, beginning this summer. She is delighted to be staying in the Pioneer Valley and continuing to explore how to best support and understand children in a variety of ways.

Maria has also been invited to participate in the American Educational Research Association’s undergraduate workshop in New York City this April.

We look forward to hearing all that she will learn!

Maria presented about the Baby Lab research at Mount Holyoke’s LEAP Symposium this fall

The end of our summer session

We are closing out a fun and successful summer session at the Hampshire Baby Lab!

We are so grateful to the families who made it in during the past few months, and to the various organizations that provided funding and resources for us to make this summer possible!

Maria received funding through the Mount Holyoke Lynk Universal Application Funding program.

Maria runs a box study with one of our summer baby scientists

Julia and Sophie received funding through the Sherman Fairchild Foundation’s Interdisciplinary Summer Research and Mentoring in the Sciences Program.

Sophie checks out the software tracking her eye movements during our visit to Harvard University

Adelle and Natalie received funding through The Foundation for Psychocultural Research-Hampshire College Program in Culture, Brain, and Development

Adelle hard at play with a sibling visitor

Natalie and one of our baby scientists play with veggies after a fun study

We will be back scheduling studies in September! We can’t wait to see you then!

Lab Field Trip!

This week our summer research team took a trip to Cambridge to visit some of the Developmental Labs at Harvard University! Dr. Rosenberg and current Harvard lab teams showed us around, and told us about the current research that students and professors are working on.

We started our day with lunch with the lab summer research assistants. These were students from colleges and universities all over the country and the world!

Sophie tried out the special eye tracking program that researchers use to monitor children’s eye movements

Research assistants showed us the studies they are running with three- to five-year olds. The research methods change so much as the participants get older!

We spent some time going over the programs we use to analyze the data we collect with the creator of the program, Jonathan Kominsky!

Connecting with other Hampshire research

Research assistants Julia and Sophie received funding for this summer through grants from the Sherman Fairchild Foundation’s Interdisciplinary Summer Research and Mentoring in the Sciences Program. As a part of the program, we had weekly meetings with other recipients on campus to learn about their ongoing research. Some of these meetings took the form of examining sheep brains, touring Hampshire’s new living building, the R. W. Kern Center, and even climbing 70 feet up to see bug traps in the Hampshire Woods!