Experimental Childhood

Deep in the labs of Harvard, past the monkeys and gene-spliced rats, there are babies. And not just any babies: Somerville babies.

Recruited through specialized mailings and a website, parents from Cambridge and the neighboring townships loan their children (from newborns to four-year-olds) to the Spelke/Carey baby labs. There, graduates run coding studies on appointed toddlers most of the week. In return, the parents have a choice between a $5 payment, a sippy cup, t-shirt or plush toy.

“I envisioned evil scientists administering drugs and laughing,” says Renata T. DeSousa ’08 when she recalls her first impression of the Spelke/Carey scene. Actually, the studies are happily non-invasive. Scientists at William James Hall concentrate on behavioral studies, not the imagined medicinal studies of effectual amounts of lead poisoning in children. Graduate students instead test the hypothesis that toddlers lose interest in visual stimuli once they understand what they see.

Kids participate in one half-hour study at a time.  First, they watch a screen with animation of a man moving his arm up and down, like he’s waving.  Then the cartoon is switched and the man begins to bend and twist his arm in an impossible motion, sort of like Stretch Armstrong.  Scientists assume that children will lose interest in the familiar waving gestures first because they understand the universal wave of “hello.”  Undergraduates time the duration of the children’s engagement with each cartoon, while leading graduate Ariel D. Grace analyzes the data collected along with colleagues. “The kids are really cute,” says Maria Barth ’06. “That’s the best part.”