Author: Marina Bazhydai

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.

A newly funded project, entitled Validation study of Wonder Chart and Wonder-full Education Questionnaire in British school children, will launch at the ALL in 2021. We will be studying how primary school children experience wonder in their learning process, and how teachers and school leaders understand the role of wonder in education settings and its effects on school climate and learning outcomes. This project is conducted in collaboration with Anders Schinkel and the Wonderful Education Project team and funded by the John Templeton Foundation. You can read more on the topic in the open source book, Wonder, education and human flourishing. which also includes our chapter:

Bazhydai, M., & Westermann, G. (2020). From curiosity, to wonder, to creativity: a cognitive developmental psychology perspective. In A. Schinkel (Ed.), Wonder, education, and human flourishing. VU University Press.

ALL members presented at the virtual interdisciplinary workshop, The Spectrum of Teaching in Humans and Other Animals, organized by the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in July 15-17, 2020. Marina presented a talk, Two-year-old children preferentially transmit simple actions but not pedagogically demonstrated actions, based on the recently published paper (you can watch the study’s the video abstract here). Didar presented a poster, Children’s Selectivity in Knowledge Transmission: Exploring the Roles of Knowledge Type and Group Membership.

Marina organised a symposium and presented at the 10th annual Budapest CEU Conference on Cognitive Development BCCCD’20. The symposium was entitled Epistemic uncertainty: Implicit encoding and information seeking from infancy to preschool. You can watch the symposium’s recording here, which included Marina’s own presentation, Preverbal infants’ selectively use social referencing in response to referential uncertainty.