Welcome to the Infant Cognition Lab at Texas A&M University! What we study:

The research in our lab focuses on the nature and development of infants’ object knowledge. We are interested in the type of information infants represent about objects, how this changes during the first year, and what factors contribute to changes in knowledge. The kinds of questions that we ask in our research include: What object knowledge do infants possess at birth or soon after? What knowledge is acquired during the first year of life? What kinds of experiences are important for learning about objects?

Recently, we have focused our investigations on two main topics. The first is object individuation: how infants determine whether an object currently in view is the very same object, or a different object, than seen before. Our research has revealed interesting and important changes in infants’ capacity to individuate objects during the first year. In addition, we have identified learning mechanisms that support these changes.

The second topic we focus on is intermodal processing. This researchexplores infants’ capacity to use information about an object acquired in one modality to interpret events experienced in another modality. We have found intriguing developmental changes in infants’ capacity to encode and use intermodal information.

Methods we use:

We use several different methods for assessing infants’ object knowledge. One method is the violation-of-expectations method. In these studies, we record the amount of time infants spend looking at events that are either consistent or inconsistent with their understanding of objects. Typically, when infants find an event inconsistent or unexpected, they look a long time at it. In related studies, we use eye-tracking methods to provide more detailed information about where infants are looking during our events. The goal of these studies is to gain a better understanding of the perceptual and cognitive processes in which infants engage by analyzing gaze patterns. We also use reaching methods to assess object knowledge in infants. We can obtain valuable information about how infants perceive and think about objects by observing how they search for and interact with those objects.

In addition to these behavioral methods, we use near-infrared spectroscopy, a non-invasive optical imaging technique, to assess the neural basis of object individuation. In the NIRS studies infants watch the same events that they see in our violation-of-expectation tasks. However, prior to the event we place an optode that emits near-infrared light on the infants’ head and during the event we record the amount of light that is refracted. Near-infrared light is sensitive to changes in blood flow. Typically, when a neural area is activated there is an increase in blood flow to that area. Hence, changes in the amount of light refracted are taken as an indicator of neural activation. This research is funded by NICHD and NSF. See Wilcox et al. (2005) for a report of data recently collected using this technique.

Please visit our research page to learn more about specific projects.