Early Visual Experiences
 
- Purpose: This project explores early visual experiences of infants from 3 months-old in the context of natural child-parent playing scenes. A small, head mounted eye tracking hat is used to document these experiences. By recording the child centered view, we will be able to document what information children are attending to, how their looking behaviors are guided by social interaction, and how these are relevant to later cognitive development.
- Studies: Infant Longitudinal Head Camera
- Age Range: 3 months -18 months
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Autism Head Camera Study
- The University of Houston Cognitive Development Lab is currently recruiting children with autism or language delay (ages 9 months to 5 years) for a study designed to advance our understanding of how children with autism develop language. By doing so, the study aims to identify how children’s looking behavior is regulated and how it serves as a way of understanding their social interaction and language development.
- The entire visit to the lab lasts approximately 90 minutes. Upon your arrival, we ask parents to fill out a few questionnaires while your child plays with well trained researchers who love children! To show our appreciation, we offer parents a copy of the video of their child participating in the study upon request, $20 in travel compensation, and a Children's Museum of Houston Family Pass. For children, we offer a small stuffed animal, T-shirt, or other toys that your child may choose from.
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Attention and Learning
  
- Purpose: These projects examine to what extent the fundamental learning effects (e.g., sensitivity to learning contexts such as timing and perceptual arrangements) guides early language learning with a series of child-friendly, game-like experiments.
- Studies: Contextual Cuing, Perceptual Similarities
- Former Studies: Highlighting, Adjective Attention
- Age Range: 36 months to 5 years
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Early Word Learning
- Purpose: This project aims to reveal how seemingly complex tasks such as language learning can be derived through various types of experiences (e.g., holding, touching) and learning effects that help children later form higher-level understanding.
- Studies: Statistical Learning, Weird, Word Learning, Verb Study
- Age Range: 17 months to 5 years
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Cross-Linguistic Comparisons
 
- Purpose: There are a number of studies in our laboratory involving data collections all over the world. We have collected data from children living in Columbia, China, Argentina, Japan, and Vietnam to explore the question of how the language(s) a child learns and uses influences the way she/he perceives the world. We specifically look into the extent in which language influences early perception and understanding of different kinds of things (e.g., animal, man-made object, and liquid).
- Studies: Training, Quantity, Ontology, Japanese/English Vocabulary Acquisition
- Age Range: 24 months to 7 years
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Bilingual Studies
 
- Purpose: This project investigates the early word learning processes in young children whose language learning environment differ (i.e., monolingual, bilingual, etc.) by examining their cognitive and language development.
- Studies: Bilingual Immigrant, Bilingual Conservation, Bilingual Diaries, Cognitive Control input
- Former Studies: Bilingual Adjective Learning
- Age Range: Birth to 5 years
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