How to participate:

If you have looked through our website or have heard about our research and would like to have your child participate in one of our studies, please contact us via e-mail at babies@waisman.wisc.edu or via phone at (608) 263-5876.

If you have received a letter or brochure from us with a reply postcard, you can also simply return the postcard.

Upon receiving your reply, we will call you to give you more information about our current studies as well as to schedule an appointment if you are interested in participating.

What happens during a visit?

Our lab is located on the 5th floor of the Waisman Center. You will be provided with a parking permit for the Waisman Center Parking Lot.

Experimental sessions

To test infants we use a variety of procedures, depending on the age of the infant. In all of our experiments, infants are always seated either with or near their parents.

The Room: The infant sits on his/her parent's lap in a small sound proof room, and listens to sounds playing from audio speakers mounted on the walls behind a curtain. Depending on the age of the infant, he/she will be seated in one of two rooms. Infants aged 6-12 months are seated in a room with lights mounted on the walls that flash to direct the infant's attention. One light is directly in front of the infant, and the other two are mounted to the sides of the infant. There is also a video camera mounted in the front of the room. The experimenter sits outside the room and watches the infant on a monitor. Click here to see a movie clip of the room. Children over the age of 12 months are seated in a room with a video monitor, rather than flashing lights. The video monitor show short clips of Winnie the Pooh along with experimental video clips.

The Procedure: For infants between the ages of 6-12 months, we use a technique called the HeadTurn Procedure. In this procedure, the front light flashes to get the infant's attention forward. When the infant looks to the front light the experimenter starts the trial and one of the side lights will begin to flash (which side is randomly chosen by the computer). When the infant turns to the light the experimenter presses a button which triggers the sound to start playing and begins recording the time that the infant is looking in that direction. The sound comes from the speaker on the same side of the room where the light is flashing. The experimenter follows the infant's head turns by pressing buttons, and when the infant turns away from the sound for longer than 2 seconds the trial will end. In this way the infant controls how long a sound plays and we get a measure of the infant's attention for that particular sound. Click here to see a movie clip of the procedure.

For infants between the ages of 12-18 months, we use a video monitor to make our experiments more interesting. In this procedure, the infants look at a monitor in the front of the room. The monitor shows a short Winnie the Pooh video to attract the infant’s attention forward. When the infant looks at the monitor, the experimenter presses a button and starts the habituation trials. In these trials, a video (for example, of a novel object) is paired with a sound (such as the name of the object) for as long as the infant is willing to look at the monitor. The experimenter records the time that the infant looks at the monitor. When the infant looks away for more than a second, the trial is over and the Winnie the Pooh video reappears. Using this technique, we can monitor how interested infants are in various sound-picture pairings, and how much they can learn about them.

As a token of our gratitude for your participation in our studies, your child will be given either a t-shirt or a board book.

What happens to the data?

All information is coded by number, not name. The results from our studies are typically first presented at professional scientific conferences (with no information identifying individual participants) and then reported in a scientific journal. A summary of the results for parents will also be made available to participating families.