For science!

The fun continues, as the boy returns from his post-vaccination rolling hiatus to begin performing deliberate tummy to back rolls (as opposed to rolling back to tummy, and rolling right back again due to trapping an arm underneath himself). He has also worked out how to grab his feet. Because he can then stick his feet in his mouth, this activity seems more rewarding.

Last week the boy made his first contributions to science. We visited the Laboratory for Developmental Studies at Harvard, where they were running an experiment for four-month-olds. It bored him, in accordance with their protocol.

The Boston area has a lot of infant and child psych labs. We registered him online with Harvard, Tufts, and MIT when he turned three months, but we needn't have bothered. Each lab checks local public birth records for new potential subjects, so over the next month we got more junk mail from the labs then we did from Enfamil. Tufts currently has no studies he's eligible for, and MIT mostly takes walk-ins at the Boston Children's Museum. MIT and Harvard also have researchers at the Museum of Science who troll for subjects.

This experiment involved infants' spatial perception of music, investigating whether four-month-olds associate "low" and "high" pitches with actual lowness and highness. It consisted of three sets of trials. First, they had the boy watch a series of stimuli (flowers) moving on a video screen and measured his gaze time. Each trial had one flower, which moved either up or down the screen until he got bored of it, at which point they drew a curtain over the screen and announced "Here's another!" before showing the next. In the second set, they showed a plain blue background and played descending scales until he got bored. Each trial of scales again ended with the curtain and began with the announcement. Finally, they returned to the flowers (again with no sound) for the last set. The theory is that if the infants link pitches and positions in space, they'll stare harder at either the ascending or the descending flowers in the third set.

I had the option of holding him on my lap or having him sit in a car seat (he sat in a car seat). I asked if they worried about mothers' unconscious movements influencing their babies, and they said no, they just told mothers not to deliberately talk or point. I wonder whether they note for each baby whether it sat in a lap or in a seat, and whether there's a significant difference between their responses. For this experiment, I wonder also whether they test half of babies on ascending scales, which I'll find out if they publish their results I guess.

I also hadn't seen them calibrate babies and observers before. They have two observers watching the baby on a camera and listening to headphones to block out noise from the experiment. Before it started, the experimenter shook a shiny rattle at various places in front of and above, below, and to the sides of the screen so the observers could compare attentiveness to the screen with looking elsewhere.

I'm probably missing some important details about how research on infants is done, but I'm impressed that it can be done at all.