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More development happens in infancy than in any other time in the life
span. Yet much of that development is unknown to us because of
the limited communicative abilities of infants, the gap between our
understanding of the world and theirs, and the difficulty older
children and adults have remembering their infancy. In the
infancy lab infants are our teachers. We attempt to design
studies to help the infant teach us about their world and the sense
they make of it.
Most recently the focus of the research in the infancy lab has been on
how infants use visual, auditory, and tactile stimulation to learn
about themselves and others. Experiments explore how infants use
the contingency present in normal social interactions with others and
in play with objects to develop their sense of self agency, i.e., that
they are effective agents in the world and can act on the social and
physical environment with predictable outcomes. Experiments also
examine how infants make use of others' interactions with them to learn
about the complexities of language and play, both of which are symbolic
systems which allow for expansions in communications and memory. With
newborn infants, experiments explore the benefits of mother-infant
skin-to-skin contact to the infants and their mothers, and to the
mother-infant relationship.
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