My brain made me do it

I’m sitting watching an eye gaze trace of an infant, doing a short-term memory experiment in the next door room. It’s a simple task. There are two windows on the screen and no distractions. An elephant appears in one window, then disappears, then a flower appears in the middle between the two windows, and then disappears again. If they look back to the window where the object disappeared, they get a reward. The baby who’s doing the experiment is 12 months old. Previously, outside in the waiting room, he was showing off his cruising skills, walking around the room, flashing coy smiles at the research assistant. His mother pulled out her phone to take a photo and he recognised what was coming, and struck a pose that he knew would make us all laugh. On the eye gaze trace that I’m watching I can see that the baby has followed the object, seen it disappear, and looked to the flower for about 500ms (half a second), until it disappears. I can see, then, from his eye movements (and from h...

Since the super-high-impact Science article , a lot of researchers in psychology have been discussing replicability in psychology, and what can be done to increase it. What kinds of experiments will this lead to? How might we, for example, address the question ‘do infants follow an adult’s gaze’ is as replicable a way as possible? Well, we make some videos (see the screenshot below) of an actress, against a blank background. We want everything to be tightly standardised, so we show exactly the same set of videos to lots of different infants. To ensure test-retest reliability we show the same (or similar) set of events to each particular infant across tons of different trials. In each trial the might start by looking down for 8000ms, then look up directly at the camera for 8000ms, then down, directly at one of the two objects, for 15000ms. We present a series of these identical clips, within everything nicely counterbalanced between objects and sides. We present them in a room, usi...

Data quality – boring, I know - but really important! We’ve just published a paper on eyetracking data that in some ways was similar to a debate that’s been happening about brain connectivity in autism. Several recent papers (see here ) suggested that people with Autism may show reduced connectivity between different areas of the brain. So there was great shock and horror when a paper raised the possibility that, in fact, this may be not because there is a genuine difference between the brains of typical people and those with Autism – but rather because people with Autism may just tend to move slightly more while they are in the scanner. The article raised the possibility that this may create the impression of reduced connectivity between brain areas, without this actually being the case. Eyetracking, in which you present still images or movie clips to participants and track where on-screen they are looking, is a powerful and versatile method that is widely used within infant p...