Collaborators: Northwestern Infant Cognition Lab, Project on Children’s Thinking

Related projects on OSF

Abstracting a structure that occurs across two or more events lets us learn quickly and organize our experiences in meaningful ways. By isolating patterns of relational abstraction in adults and older children, we want to see whether a continuous process helps us do this by looking at the youngest infants we can test: 

• Can 3-month-olds abstract two simple relations (same vs different) & it it through the same process seen in older children?
  • Does comparison improve learning?
  • Does highlighting irrelevant objects hurt learning?
  • See paper

We are also looking for changes that occur between 3 months and 1 year:

• How do improvements in perceptual acuity affect learning relations? (see poster)
• How early does language help this type of learning?
  • Do children need to produce language for relational labels to help them re-conceptualize objects? Or is comprehension enough?
  • How early does a relational label have a beneficial effect compared to an object label having a harmful effect for relational abstraction?

Collaborators: Northwestern Infant Cognition Lab, Higher-level Cognition Lab Related projects on OSF

How do infants begin to navigate a complex physical world? As adults, we perform everyday feats that reflect our knowledge that objects and substances have different physical properties, such as anticipating that we will have to eat yogurt by the spoonful, but that we can pick up a piece of toast, and it will remain whole until it reaches our mouth. How do infants know to expect a solid object or a nonsolid substance? We’re exploring whether infants use the following cues, and how they weigh each when they are put into conflict:

• Motion cues (maintaining the same shape when a container is moved vs deforming) lead infants to expect an impermeable solid or permeable substance by 5 months.
• Can appearance alone (a structured deliberate shape or an unorganized pile) set up similar expectations?

Are infants’ early expectations symmetric across the non/solid divide or does the more constrained behavior of solid objects lead to more consistent expectations?

We look at 5-month-olds to establish early baselines in this domain which we can compare to the developmental trajectory of solid object knowledge. (see paper)

At 12-14 months, we ask whether infants change how they explore an item after receiving conflicting visual and tactile information or two conflicting visual cues. Do some cues seem to matter more for how infants categorize item?

Collaborators: Playful Learning Chicago, Metro Family Services, Legat Architects

Learning happens in and out of the classroom, so how can we improve the opportunities for teachers, parents and children to make meaningful connections in each of these spaces?

The Northwestern Infant cognition lab, alongside our partners, is designing and evalutating simple, fun interventions targeting parent-child conversations about math, shapes, and literacy.