Experiment On Your Kids

Now that I have your attention with my sensationalistic title, let me tell you how I did a small (and absolutely harmless, I promise) study on my infant daughter.

Our lecture for this week was on Perceptual Development, and a special part of the lecture was devoted to explaining how psychologist has learned to study infants and their development.  As the lecture describes, early concepts of infant development saw them as passive "blank slates" who did not interact with their environment in any meaningful way.  This was because infants were mostly observed and measured on child or adult standards that relied heavily on motor coordination beyond an infant's capacities.  Psychologist eventually developed ways to study infants, however, and learned of their complex sensory lives.

One important method was to carefully observe infants and measure their eye movements or looking, along with sucking rates and heart rates.  This type of observation is then paired with studies of Habituation and Dis-habituation.  Habituation refers to that fact that when repeatedly presented with the same stimuli, infants will lose interest and pay attention to it for shorter and shorter amounts of time.  Dis-habituation occurs when the infant is then presented with a new or novel stimuli.  The infants response to the new stimuli, usually measured by how long the infant pays attention, can then be compared.  For studies of visual perception, this is usually done by observing and timing the infant's gaze on various images.

For my own little study, I used my 5 month old daughter.  I presented here with a toy she wasn't familiar with (one of her brother's toys) and watched how long she stared at it.  Here's a picture of the toy:


I thought this would be a good object to use to test for her attention because it has a face shape on it, and, as we have learned this week, infants are pre-disposed to seek out human faces.  As one would commonly predict, my daughter was very interested in the toy at first, staring for 7-8 seconds.  But after several viewings, she had little interest in it and completely stopped looking.

As you might notice from looking at the toy, however, it is a spring and can stretch out to this shape:




When I showed my daughter the stretched out shape of the toy, she immediately regained interest and stared intently for 8-9 seconds.  An interesting aspect of the toy when stretched out is that the face shape becomes distorted.  It is divided into segments and stretched out.  If stretched out long enough, the face becomes unrecognizable.  It seemed that even though my daughter initially showed great interest in the stretched out shape of the toy, she seemed to habituate to it even faster than the contracted shape.  Perhaps this fact displays a novel example of infant's preference for human faces, even over novelty in shape.  Even though the novelty of the new shape was interesting, perhaps the distortion caused in the face shape when stretched out caused her to have less overall interest.