Information for parents and children

When you come to the Psychology Department to participate in one of our studies, one of our friendly research assistants will be waiting for your family in the front lobby of Spence Labs. From there, he/she will take you upstairs to our lab. Once we arrive at our lab, we will sit in our waiting room as the research assistant explains the goals and the procedures of the study during your visit to our lab. He/she may ask you a few questions at this time and have you fill out some brief paperwork. You are also free to ask any questions that you have before beginning the actual experiment. In addition, the waiting room is filled with toys and if necessary we can provide care for any other children if they come along as well.

Once you and your infant are comfortable, we will proceed to our testing room. In our testing room, your infant will be seated on your lap in front of a large TV monitor. Infants will be presented with both images on the monitor as well as with sounds. Specifically, we are looking at how infants are beginning to learn language and how they may be parsing up the acoustical information that they are constantly exposed to. In some of our studies we do this by recording how long an infant is interested in different kinds of sounds, as measured by how long they look at the TV monitor while each sound is playing. Other studies of ours use a remote eye tracker. Using the eye tracker will allow us to examine specifically where infants are looking on the monitor. All of the procedures used have been approved by the University of Iowa’s Internal Review Board.

Please click here for directions to the lab.

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