Bringing Home Baby Euclid: Testing Infants’ Basic Shape Discrimination Online

Online developmental psychology studies are still in their infancy, but their role is newly urgent in the light of the COVID-19 pandemic and the suspension of in-person research. Are online studies with infants a suitable stand-in for lab-based studies? Across two unmonitored online experiments using a change-detection looking-time paradigm with 96 7-month-old infants, we found that infants did not exhibit measurable sensitivities to the basic shape information that distinguishes between 2D geometric forms, as had been observed in previous lab experiments. Moreover, while infants were distracted in our online experiments, such distraction was nevertheless not a reliable predictor of their ability to discriminate shape information. Our findings suggest that the change-detection paradigm may not elicit infants’ shape discrimination abilities when stimuli are presented on small, personal computer screens because infants may not perceive two discrete events with only one event displaying uniquely changing information that draws their attention. Some developmental paradigms used with infants, even those that seem well-suited to the constraints and goals of online data collection, may thus not yield results consistent with lab results that rely on highly controlled settings and specialized equipment, such as large screens. As developmental researchers continue to adapt lab-based methods to online contexts, testing those methods online is a necessary first step in creating robust tools and expanding the space of inquiry for developmental science conducted online.

在线发展心理学研究仍处于初级阶段，然而，在COVID-19疫情爆发及面对面研究暂停的背景下，其作用变得尤为迫切。对于婴儿的在线研究是否能够作为基于实验室研究的替代品？在两项未受监控的在线实验中，我们采用变化检测注视时间范式，对96名7个月大的婴儿进行了研究。我们发现，婴儿并未表现出对区分二维几何形状的基本形状信息的可测量敏感性，这与先前实验室实验中的观察结果不符。此外，尽管在我们的在线实验中婴儿受到了干扰，但这种干扰并不能可靠地预测他们区分形状信息的能力。我们的研究结果表明，当刺激在小型个人电脑屏幕上呈现时，变化检测范式可能无法激发婴儿的形状辨别能力，因为婴儿可能无法感知仅有一个事件显示独特变化信息而吸引其注意的两个离散事件。因此，一些用于婴儿的发展范式，即使它们似乎非常适合在线数据收集的约束和目标，也可能无法产生与高度控制环境和专业设备（如大屏幕）依赖的实验室结果相一致的结果。随着发展研究者们不断将基于实验室的方法适应在线环境，在线测试这些方法成为创建稳健工具和拓展在线发展科学探究空间的必要第一步。