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News from the Babylab

Posted on 17 October 2014

Testing babies' preferences using the eye-tracker

Eleven-month-old babies have been the first participants to use the department’s new eye-tracker, taking part in a Babylab study that is being run as part of Catherine Laing's doctoral study. The experiment is testing whether pre-linguistic infants have a preference for onomatopoeic words such as woof over their non-onomatopoeic counterparts, such as doggie. So far, 28 babies and their parents have taken part, and the results will be analysed over the next few months. We are also working on new ways to use the eye-tracker in the Babylab, including using it alongside a head-turn preference procedure to combine this more traditional experimental method with pupil dilation measurements.

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