Check out our current studies!

You can meet us in lab with our in person studies!

Six cartoon animals are in the middle of the image with a semi circle of triangles below the animals that are orange, pink, and white. The animals are a dog, mouse, cat, bear, rabbit, and dog. Above the animals is text that reads "animal jumble". Below the triangles is text that reads "infant cognition lab uc davis"

Animal Jumble

Babies have varying experience with animals — from experiences in the park, zoo, on television, or even in their own home! We are interested in whether babies with pets in their home look at, and therefore, learn about animals differently than babies without pets. What animal do you think will end up being the king of the jumble?

White cartoon hand pointing with one finger to the right of the screen on a pink background. The word "Pointing" is above the hand in red text

Pointing

Babies experience the world in many ways—through toys, objects, and interactions with their caregivers. With so much happening around them, what captures their attention? In this study, we are exploring how babies respond to social cues, specifically pointing gestures. We want to understand whether pointing helps guide babies' attention and shapes how they learn about their environment.
 
Cartoon baby sitting next to flowers and thinking of a sunny day. Text below says: "Scene Memory"

Scene Memory

Infants are born into a visually complex, stimulus-rich world. Across the first year of life, infants learn to direct their attention to the parts of their environments that are meaningful and relevant to their goals. In this study, we examine how infants visually explore naturalistic scenes and then test whether they demonstrate memory for objects within the scenes.

Cartoon infant looking at two identical pictures

Scene Repeat

Infants’ visual attention is shaped not just by what they see, but by what they’ve seen before. In this study, we explore how infants look at everyday scenes—like parks, kitchens, or playrooms—and whether they recognize the same scene when it's shown again. By measuring how infants look at repeated scenes, we can learn how early memory and attention interact over development.

There are four black and white circles of different sizes, with the text "Visual acuity infant cognition lab uc davis" written below the circles. Inside the circles, on the left half of the circle, it is a solid black color. On the right half of the circles, there are black and white horizontal lines across the circle. The thickness of the lines is varied amongst the different circles.

Visual Acuity

A classic approach for assessing infant vision sensitivity is to measure their ability to resolve fine details using square wave gratings. Black and white stripes are shown to your infant and if they can see the stripes of the grating, they should prefer to look to them. We are investigating whether an eye tracking procedure is comparable to more commonly used Teller Acuity Cards. Watch the video below for more information

 

Or you can now participate from home with our online studies! 

We are not currently running any online studies at this time, but if you still want to participate with other labs you can find studies for your child on Lookit.