Welcome to the Developmental Learning Lab!
We are a developmental psychology lab at the University of Waterloo. Our research focuses on cognitive development in infants and children under the age of seven.
What We Do
We design “puppet shows” for infants and games and stories for young children. Then we examine how they engage with these things by seeing what infants like to look at and how children solve our games and think about our stories to better understand how they learn.
Our Research
The researchers in our lab are interested in how infants and children learn. We examine classic topics in cognitive and developmental psychology, such as how children learn about physical objects, causality, probability and numeracy, and how they learn about other people. Our methods involve looking paradigms, eye tracking, and choice tasks.
Get Involved
Our lab conducts studies with children aged four months to seven years. Participating in one of our studies with your child can be a very interesting opportunity for parents, and a fun and engaging experience for children! A typical study involves meeting our team of researchers at the University of Waterloo and participating in a five to ten minute experiment. During the experiment, we observe your child's reactions to particular events while he or she is sitting on your lap or sitting next to you. Usually, we time how long infants look at different stimuli, or we observe the kinds of objects that they reach for or crawl towards to gain an understanding of what they know about a concept. With older children, we often ask questions about how they think new objects work or ask them to make guesses using simple, intuitive probability. The entire visit lasts approximately 30 minutes, and your child will receive a small gift as a thank-you for helping us in our research.
If you are interested in participating, please visit our Study Participation page for more information.
The Developmental Learning Lab, in collaboration with the Lab for Infant Devleopment and Language and the Child Cognition Lab, are now running online studies using Zoom! These studies will be completely online, so it will not require a visit to the lab. We are currently running these studies with children ages 3-7 years old. More information can be found at www.uwcoral.ca.
Follow us on social media for lab updates, participation opportunities, and fun, educational community events!
facebook.com/infantstudiesgroup
