Projects

How do babies develop an awareness of their body?

Dr Manos Tsakiris, & Rosie Drysdale

Vision and touch are two senses which give babies information about their body. Sensory contact between infants and caregivers (e.g. skin-to-skin contact) helps babies to develop a sense of their caregiver’s body as well as their own. However, we know very little about how sensory signals coming from inside the body (heartbeats) help babies learn about their body. It is important to investigate this, because our ability to be sensitive to changes in one’s own bodily states, such as heartbeats, is linked to our ability to regulate our emotions as well as to be better able to perceive other people’s emotions – a skill that remains important across one’s lifetime. Our project will be among the first to study how this ability emerges early in life! We will track changes in social emotional behaviours and changes in how infants experience body sensations across development, starting at around 12 months old. If you are interested in signing up, please visit the “Take Part” tab on the website and sign up to our family database.

 

Do infants learn new words from educational picture books?

Dr Jeanne Shinskey, Dr Jessie Ricketts, Dr Amber Muhinyi

Educational picture books on first words are often marketed for very young infants. However, there is little research on whether infants are capable of learning educational content from picture books. Infants have immature symbolic insight – the understanding that a picture (e.g., of a frog) symbolises a real-world thing. They may thus struggle to transfer information learned from a picture book to the intended real-world referents. Some features of educational picture books may help this insight whereas other features may hinder it. The general aim of this project is to assess 1-year-olds’ learning from educational picture books read by parents at home for several weeks. The findings will advance theoretical understanding about the development of infants’ symbolic insight and yield practical implications for designing picture books with features that promote infants’ learning.

Are preschool ‘educational’ apps truly educational?

Dr Jeanne Shinskey, Dr Jessie Ricketts, Grace Pocock

Apps are everywhere! There are an increasing number of apps targeted at young children claiming to be ‘educational’ but providing no evidence to support this. More and more children are using apps on a regular basis, and they are even being introduced into the classroom. However, very little is known about how effective they are as a teaching resource, and which features may be useful for children’s learning, and which are distracting! We are looking at whether self-proclaimed ‘educational’ apps are truly educational, which features may help or hinder learning, and how they compare to traditional media, such as books. We are also looking at the effect of social interaction during app usage, both from human interaction outside of the app, and from avatar interaction inside the app.