Author: Marina Bazhydai

Our study on infants’ curiosity-driven learning study has received an in-principle Stage 1 acceptance at the Developmental Science journal. The study will recruit 18-month-old infants to take part in the gaze-contingent eye tracking lab experiment exploring the proposed benefits of active learning as compared to passive learning on information retention. The data collection is about to begin at the Lancaster University Babylab pending pandemic restrictions easing.

Bazhydai, M., Jones, S. D., & Westermann, G. (Registered Report Stage 1 in-principle acceptance, April 2020). Does curiosity enhance word learning in 18-month-old infants? Developmental Science. Pre-print protocol available here.

Marina attended the virtual Society for Research in Child Development Biennial Meeting on April 7-9, 2021, and presented her work on pre-verbal infants’ social referencing of their social partners following an epistemic violation of expectation.

Malcolm Wong has been awarded a prestigious and highly competitive 1+3 ESRC (Economic and Social Research Council) scholarship from the North West Social Science Doctoral Training Partnership to pursue his MSc and PhD programmes at Lancaster under the supervision on Dr Jessica Wang (of the Cognition of Social Interaction, CoSI Lab) and Dr Marina Bazhydai. Malcolm has been working on a number of research projects at CoSI, ALL and Babylab for the past 3 years throughout his undergraduate degree, and this will be an excellent opportunity to continue his research career.

Marina presented her and her collaborators’ recent work in a presentation entitled, Communicating for Knowledge: Infants’ Information Seeking and Transmission in Social Contexts, at the virtual Society for Personality and Social Psychology annual convention (SPSP) Origins of Social Minds pre-conference. which brought together researchers from developmental, comparative and cross-cultural psychology. You can watch this short presentation here.

ALL joins a large-scale collaboration, the Many Babies 5 project through the Many Babies Consortium, to study the Hunter and Ames’ (1988) model of infants’ preference for familiar and novel stimuli of different complexity at different ages. The goal of the ManyBabies collaboration is to conduct multi-lab replications of influential experiments in developmental psychology, promoting open science, diversity, transparency and replicability in our science. We are excited to be a part of this thriving international community! Learn more about Many Babies here.

Marina, Didar and Elena attended the annual Budapest CEU Conference on Cognitive Development (BCCCD’21) held online this year. The conference covered a wide range of topics, such as communication, pragmatics, social cognition, conceptual development, language acquisition, numeracy, object cognition, perceptual learning, inductive learning, memory, executive function, metacognition, the cognitive bases of culture, and comparative cognition. You can view the full programme here.

Two MSc students join the lab to work on their dissertation projects:

Elena Gkari is a Master’s student on the Psychological Research Methods programme at Lancaster University. She holds a BSc degree in Marketing and Communication from the Athens University of Economics and Business, and has worked in the marketing sector of toy companies and NGOs for the past 5 years. She is interested in how infants explore the world around them through play and what drives their curiosity. She is also interested in investigating how toys are designed and what makes a toy attractive to an infant. As many toy companies nowadays prioritize the production of educational toys, and parents prefer to spend more money on them, Elena aims to explore how an educational toy can also be attractive to infants and how infant development can be accelerated through play.

Freya Hill is studying on the MSc in Developmental Disorders programme at Lancaster University. She has a broad interest in infant and child development, particularly with regards to active learning, infant-caregiver interactions and curiosity. She also has a fascination for neurotypical development and currently works as an SEN tutor in a specialist college.

Marina published a peer commentary, Infants actively seek and transmit knowledge via communication,  to the article by Phillips et al, Knowledge before belief, published in Behavioral and Brain Science journal. We support the key claim of the article and additionally argue that infants’ knowledge representations are actively communicated in information-seeking and information-giving social contexts.

We welcome Ellie and Maddy as the Department of Psychology Employability Programme (PEP) research students for 2020-2021. They will be involved in the curiosity in social learning projects in the lab.

In this line of inquiry, using the longitudinal observational dataset obtained as part of the ESRC International Centre for Language and Communicative Development LuCiD Language 0-5 project, with our colleagues at Manchester University, we investigate infants’ active information-seeking strategies and their caregivers’ responsivity to such interrogative bids between 11-30 months.

Marina has been interviewed for the Salford’s University Cognitive Development Lab Child Development Podcast episode. The conversation evolves around infant curiosity and its effect on successful learning outcomes, developmental precursors to creativity, active information-seeking and information-giving in early childhood. You can listen to the podcast here.