Jen's Blog

Elliot in the lab

Elliot and I went up to Berkeley yesterday to participate in a UC Berkeley Infant Studies Center study. He was in the Moving Room/Visual Cliff experiment, which he really enjoyed. Briefly, here’s what we did:

The first part was the Moving Room experiment. Elliot was placed in a high chair in a box; the walls, ceiling, and floor of the box move, but he remained still. The idea was to see how he reacted when the walls moved (kind of like when you are at a car wash; even though your car is not moving, the movement of the brushes makes you think you are going forward.). Elliot jerked quite a bit the first time, but his subsequent reactions seemed pretty subdued. We had a hard time getting him to face forward. The box had a small tv showing a Baby Einstein video, and they had little lights they could blink to attract his attention. But the boy seemed much more interested in the strap on the highchair!

The second part was the Visual Cliff experiment. Elliot was put on a large sheet of plexiglass about 4 feet off the ground. Half of the plexiglass was painted such that he couldn’t tell he was off the ground. The other half was clear, letting him know that the ground was far below. (Here is a good picture of what it looked like.) I stood on one side of the plexiglass and tried to coax him towards me. For some of the rounds he only had to crawl on the “normal” (i.e. non-cliff) part of the plexiglass, other times he was supposed to crawl over the clear part to me (crossing over the “cliff”). Elliot had no problem on the normal plexiglass, but absolutely would not cross over to the clear part, no matter what I did or said. But he didn't look scared or anything. Instead, he crawled along the border between the two parts, towards the wall, and started playing with the foam border.

The last part was a crawling obstacle course. The course was a small hallway, about 12-15 feet long. I sat at one end for each round and tried to get Elliot to crawl to me. In the first round there was nothing in the hallway. The second round had baby gates arranged in a zig-zag pattern, so there was no straight path from one end to the other. The third round had a mattress and large beanbag. In the fourth round Elliot had to crawl through a large tube. And the last round I had to stand at one end of the tube (he could only see my legs) and call his name. As soon as he entered the tube I stepped away, but kept calling his name. Elliot crawled really well through all of the courses, although he was a bit distracted by the safety gates initially, so he took longer in that round. I think this was Elliot’s favorite part…he just loves moving!

Then I got to fill out some questionnaires asking the dates for the onset of various skills (like crawling, sitting on his own, etc.) The whole thing took about an hour and a half, and we both had a blast. Elliot got a certificate thanking him for his participation, and a t-shirt. We’ll also get a copy of their paper when they’re finished (and published!)

Posted by Jen at May 24, 2006 01:01 PM