Infant Physics on Lookit

Looking time methods are widely used in developmental psychology to measure early knowledge in young infants. While these studies have uncovered much of the rich knowledge representations available to young children, practical limitations on participant recruitment and testing prevent detailed investigation into questions of (a) how universal or generalizable the effects are across a broaderpopulation, (b) the stability of measurements within individuals, and (c) whether population-level null effects might conceal partial knowledge states within individuals. Therefore, we will use dense sampling of individual infants on Lookit to conduct a detailed assessment of early understanding of several physical principles and obtain measures of within-individual stability in both looking behavior and physics knowledge. We will assess age-related developments across the sample and within individual infants. We do this by showing infants pairs of videos, each showing an object either following or violating some physical principle, and measuring infants’ looking time to assess their expectations.