I graduated!

Last month when I returned to work, I found a brochure for UC Davis' Center for the Mind and Brain Infant Cognition Lab discussing the studies that were conducting. As a scientist myself, I thought it would be cool to participate in the experiments on how babies learn. They looked harmless and very interesting so I called them up about participating in their experiments and she had her appointment this morning. Just like her mommy, she was comfortable in a laboratory setting, although this lab was a lot different from the one that I work in.

When we arrived, we were ushered into a waiting room that was filled with comfy couches and toys. There was one "subject" already in the room, a young girl who was trying unsuccessfully to find a toy that worked...apparently all the battery operated toys weren't working. A female student sat with us and explained the studies that Lauren was to participate in and handed me a clipboard of consent forms. One was a memory study and another was a cateogorization study. Before we began, I nursed Lauren and even though we were alone in the room, I had this eerie feeling that we were being watched. This was, after all, a behavioral observation "laboratory" and I couldn't help but feel that the room was somehow a study in itself. That the room had a purposeful design and that every move and reaction I had was being observed. Is that clock on the wall displaying the wrong time on purpose and is someone counting the number of times I look up check it? Did they remove all the batteries in the toys to see how the children are reacting? Is this couch green for a reason? Of course, I was being silly, and we were not being watched. If we were, then I'm sorry for leaking breastmilk onto the sofa. I couldn't help it, Lauren was distracted by all the toys and kept popping off my breast to look around.

When we were finally called in for the experiment, Lauren was in a good mood well behaved. She sat on my lap and stared at a video screen that flashed some colored lines and after 5 minutes it was over. This was the memory study. On the screen flashed a vertical yellow line and a blue horizontal line. The two lines appeared intermittently in different areas on the screen. Halfway through the experiment, they changed the orientation of the lines; the yellow line became horizontal and the blue line, vertical. Her reaction to this change was what the scientists were looking for. At her age, would she notice that there was something different? Would she remember that the yellow line was previously horizontal? The could tell this by how long she stared at the screen when they changed the orientation of the lines. If she looked at the lines for even a second longer than she had been or if her eyes opened wide or if her face showed some kind of reaction, it showed that she recognized the change.

For the second study on categorization, she wore a headband that had a sensor positioned on her right eyebrow. There was a camera on the table in front of us, pointed at the sensor at this allowed them to somehow track her eye movements so they could tell what she was looking at. It was pretty cool. Again, she sat on my lap and I had to hold her hands so that she wouldn't reach up to remove the headband and they flashed pictures of animals and faces on the screen. The experiment's purpose was to see what part of the picture she would focus on first; if they showed a picture of a dog, did she look at the head first or the tail? When they flashed a face, did she look at the eyes first or the mouth? During the testing, I had to wear dark glasses so that Lauren wouldn't see my eyes and I couldn't actually see what she was looking at during the test itself (They played the video back for me afterwards just so I could see what exactly they were showing her). I was a little creeped out by the looping snippets of Barney, Teletubbies, and Blues Clues and Vivaldi that they were playing in the background. Halfway through the testing I peeked by looking down through a crack in the glasses and noticed that Lauren was more interested in her purple socks than what was flashing on the screen. Oh well. She is after all, only 3.75 months old.

Afterwards, Peter called me to see how it went and he asked me, "So, is she a genius?" He was disappointed that it wasn't THAT kind of testing. It was a fun experience and I would probably bring her back to participate again. She can now proudly say that she contributed to science AND she got a cool tshirt out of it!

Graduate
University of California, Davis
Infant Cognition Lab