Current Studies

Here are some studies we’re currently running in the lab. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us.

Social Evaluations

These studies ask whether infants can tell the difference between someone who is helpful and someone who is unhelpful, and whether they prefer helpful others. We use a variety of puppet shows to ask this question, including situations of helping a puppet up a hill, helping a puppet open a box to get a toy, and giving a puppet a dropped ball, and then we ask if infants prefer helpful characters over unhelpful ones. Click here to see some of our puppet shows in action!

Ingroups and Outgroups
These studies ask whether infants, like adults, prefer those who are like them in some way versus those who are not like them. Using various cues to group membership (food preferences, clothing, toy preferences) babies are shown puppets who share these traits with them, and those who do not. We then see if babies prefer to play with a puppet who is like them. Click here to see the food preferences puppet show.

Faces

This study asks what young babies understand about different facial expressions. To adults, a face expressing fear is quite different from a face expressing happiness, but it is not clear how babies come to understand these important differences in expressions. In this study, babies are shown lots of different faces, and we record their attention.

Reciprocity

As adults, we usually treat others the way that they treat us. That is, if someone is nice to us, we should probably be nice right back. If someone is mean to us, however, it is more ok to be mean back. In this study, we show babies cartoons of characters being either helpful or unhelpful to another character who is trying to climb a hill. On some trials, we switch who gets to do the helping - are babies surprised to see the Climber be unhelpful to the one who helped him before?