What we do
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. Usually, we time how long infants look at different stimuli, or we observe the kinds of objects young children reach for or crawl towards to gain an understanding of what they know about a concept. 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 the parent of multiple children in our age range, we may contact you to run siblings either simultaneously or back-to-back, depending on the eligibility of your children for different studies. If it's the case that only one of your children is eligible for a study at the current time, you are more than welcome to bring all your children to the study, and we will have a research assistant on hand to babysit the other children while you are in the study with your child.
If you are interested in participating in our studies, please visit our sign up page and fill out an information form. This information allows us to contact you when your child is of an eligible age to take part in one of our studies. Your sign-up is not a commitment to participate in a study– it is simply our way of keeping you updated.
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.