We never tire of research, it seems. The “BabyLab – LBB” of the Laboratoire Psychologique de la Perception at Paris V – Descartes University still has us in the files (from this participation at 10 months), and this time they were looking for 16-months-old babies.
So we went there for a study on the use of instruments. Apparently, this is an ability that develops between 12 and 18 months. I was told that if you give a 12-months-old a rake with a toy inside, the baby will pull the rake to get the toy. If the toy sits beside the rake, the baby won’t make the connection. At 18 months, however, the baby will use the rake to fetch the toy.
My girl didn’t get a rake but a bunch of strings, one of which was attached to, of all things, a rubber duck. She always picked out the one string attached to the ducky right away.
It was interesting when they showed me the video afterwards that included the tracking of her eye movements.
Apparently only a small minority of their test candidates had been able to pick out the right strings that quickly. 🙂

As their colleagues next door happened to be looking for 16-months-olds too, we moved on. This study was about speech, and if babies can learn a new word in a short time and distinguish it from a similar-sounding one.
So while I had my eyes shut tight to avoid confusing the eye movement tracking device, my girl got to watch a screen where different objects were presented with nonsense names, in pairs that sounded similar. It would go, “This is a pug. Look at the pug. What a nice pug. Look what I’m doing with the pug. I’m putting the pug here.” Then it would disappear and another object would be introduced in the same way as a “puk”. In the end, both objects were visible and the candidate (my girl) was asked to look at the [one of the two].
We went through eight pairs, and she never became impatient. (I did, after about the fifth “What a nice…!”) The researchers said she was the most patient candidate they have ever seen. 🙂 🙂

Both sets of researchers asked if they could keep our contact data for future use. I told them to go ahead. My girl seems to enjoy it just as much as I do. Plus, it gets her used to going to university. 😉

Edited in July 2016 to add a link to the LBB’s newsletter n° 5 which describes a study of bilingual kids (p. 3) that strongly resembles the second study we participated in on this day.