How Does Fire Look
Do babies have an expectation about how fire is supposed to behave?
In a 10-minute study over Zoom, your baby will watch a video of fire. Sometimes the fire looks completely normal, and sometimes it looks reversed and weird! Does your baby detect the difference in fire like adults do?
Little Statistician
Do babies look differently at a sampling event given various sampling procedures?
In a 10-minute study over Zoom, your baby will sit on a high-chair or on your lap and watch a movie where a series of sampling events take place. A puppet will draw objects several times from one location to another, and we will provide different final outcomes and see if your baby looks longer at certain outcomes.
Playing Together
How do babies think about many agents acting together toward the same end?
In a 10-minute study over Zoom, your baby will watch animated videos of agents trying to catch the same ball bouncing all around. Will your baby be surprised when the agents start to pursue different but identically-looking balls? We are interested in how babies think about many agents acting together toward the same end.
Flying Fish
How do babies learn arbitrary rules about novel events?
In a 15 minutes study over Zoom, your baby will watch animated videos of colorful fish that alternate between swimming and flying to fun, vibrant music. Will your baby be surprised when the fish start to fly in a novel configuration? We are interested in investigating how babies use subtle cues to learn arbitrary rules and predict novel events.
Who did better
Do babies and young children expect people to have different task performance under different situations?
In this study, we are interested in whether babies have expectations about what other people can do. During the study, your child will sit on a high-chair or on your lap in front of your computer. Babies will watch some movies; young children will watch some videos and pictures and make some guesses about who did what. The game ranges from 10-20 minutes based on the child’s age and tasks.
Yummy Bug, Yucky Cake
Do babies and children expect other people to think bugs are yucky and cakes are yummy?
In a 15-minute study over Zoom, your child will watch a video of two people who like certain things. Sometimes those things are completely normal and sometimes they’re surprising! Does your child detect the difference like adults do?
Where’s the Dax
How do children learn what new objects are called?
In this study, we are interested in what kinds of reasoning children use to learn new names for objects. Are children able to infer that new words apply to new objects that they don’t already have names for? Your child will see a series of paired images, in which one of the images will be an object that they may already know (like a teddy bear), while the other will be unknown. They will be asked to look or point at one of the two images based on a known label (like “bear”) or a made-up word (like “dax”). The study takes about 10-15 minutes and children usually have a lot of fun!
Where will the ball end up
How do children reason about outcomes that could have happened, but didn’t?
In this 15-minute study over Zoom, we are interested in children’s understanding of possibility, specifically what does it mean to say that something could have happened? Your child will see a ramp with three outcomes that can be made possible or impossible. Do children think about probabilities the way adults do?
The Johns Hopkins University 