Stavanger Baby Lab

What is our general aim?

We study how children in the first two years of life develop their cognitive competences and their social understanding. We aim to unveil the most fundamental and basic representations that infants use to start navigating the social world and to learn from experience how to adapt to the social norms prevailing in their cultural context.

Projects

We have several ongoing projects, and we are always looking for new participants.

• Little leaders project: Here we study which expectations infants possess regarding how a leader (an agent displaying respect-based social power) would behave with its followers. Here you can see an example of prior research.
• Equality project: Here we study how infants intuitively expect resources to be divided within a group and between agents with different rank and status. See an example of prior research here.

Participate in our research

You are very welcome to participate with your child (0-2 years). Most of our studies are done online, via the UiS secure Zoom platform, so you can participate from home.

The studies are short and fun! A videocall usually takes between 15 and 30 minutes.

We will show your child (who will be with you all the time) a set of short, animated videos appropriate to their age and depicting simple social interactions between agents (e.g., a division of resources). We will analyze what aspects of the scenarios and which interactions are most surprising for children at a given age. In this way, we can infer what are the expectations of infants and what is their intuitive understanding.

Here you can see a presentation of the method we employ.

If you would like to be contacted when we have a study that suits your child’s age, please contact us via email or register here.

Where?

Currently, our studies are conducted online, via Zoom.

Soon, some studies will be conducted physically in the lab, for parents and children who live in the Stavanger region. We are currently setting up the physical lab at UiS.

The research in the media:

• A new study finds infants can discern between leaders and bullies (Big Think)
• What does a 2-year-old know? You may be surprised (WebMD)
• Even babies can spot a bully … and disobey them (The Times)