Research, to the average college student, means opening your laptop and going straight to Google.

So it seems natural that a psychological research lab that produces ground-breaking research can operate using little more than a desktop computer and a few basic video cameras.

The Infant Cognition Laboratory has been conducting research experiments on campus since 1984. Supported by grants and run largely with the help of undergraduate students, the lab actually runs experiments that are studied by students in psychology classes everywhere, including at the University.

“We study how infants and toddlers make sense of the world around them, how they reason and learn about the world,” said Dr. Renee Baillargeon, director of the Infant Cognition Lab.

The lab investigates how children from ages three months to three years learn and interact with the physical, psychological, biological and social world around them. This is done through three methods, all of which can be observed and recorded.

In violation-of-expectation tasks, an infant might be shown two different videos; for example, a video of someone being nice and one of someone being mean. Experimenters would observe which of the two the child looks at longer. From this, they can understand that the infant looks at that video longer because it goes against what they anticipate. This shows how a child expects people to behave.

In simple action tasks, a researcher may show the child an object such as a small toy, hide it, and then ask the child to search for the object.

In an event selection task, an infant might again be shown two different videos simultaneously, and then be allowed to pick which of the two he or she wants to see again, which reveals their preference.

Natalie Rothstein, a junior in LAS, works in the Allen lab, another psychological research lab on campus. There, she transcribes interviews for a gender and dating violence focus group so that researchers can compile and evaluate the interviews. “The technology we use is just a PC computer that has all of the audio files on it, and then a pedal that you can start, stop, fast forward and rewind the audio clip with so you can use your hands for typing. Then we just use our own headphones to listen,” said Rothstein.

For all these different and seemingly complicated types of experiments, researchers use only the bare minimum of technology. Some of the most vital technological tools include televisions and computers, and simple video cameras are used to record the child’s reactions, facial expressions and movements. However, the lab’s greatest resource is the students who work there.

“(Undergraduate assistants) are the ones performing experiments,” said Peipei Setoh, a graduate student who works in the lab. “We show puppet shows (for the infants)…They will be moving the boxes, putting the penguins on top of each other…We don’t really interact with (the children) directly for the experiments, but when they come in, we play with them and stuff like that.”

Undergraduate assistants are also in charge of coding throughout the experiments, meaning that they keep track of children’s movements, count behaviors, track where their eyes go, and make other observations.

Students who assist in the lab work in three-hour shifts, and each child is there for one hour. Each age group requires a different experiment, so the research assistants are required to know how to run over twenty different trials. For the first semester a student works in the lab, they can earn credit for PSYC 290, and each semester after that, they can choose to earn more credit or to work for pay.

“The work is very labor intensive,” said Baillargeon. “It takes lots and lots of wonderful undergraduate assistants…They set up for one experiment, they practice, they make sure they know exactly what to do…They have to do lots of experiments in a single shift, and there isn’t much time.”

Baillargeon further expressed her gratitude for the students who work as assistants in the lab, as well as for the parents and babies from the Champaign-Urbana area who volunteer to participate in the experiments. However, she said it has been more and more difficult recently to recruit parents to bring their children into the lab.

“One of the down sides of technology is that…many young families now don’t have landlines, they just have cell phones, and there is no phone book for cell phones. It’s actually more difficult now to do research, because we don’t know how to reach young families, we don’t have their phone numbers,” said Baillargeon.

With technology that both solves and creates challenges for the lab, researchers have adapted by seeking out subjects in the community using more hands-on methods: yet another example of how science must continuously adjust to the rapid changes that technology brings.