Soderstrom – methods for studying infants

There are a lot fewer studies these days that use sucking procedures. Those are usually done with the really young infants, so newborns or first few months of life. And typically, again you would associate the sucking with a stimulus, so a sound or a visual display would appear when they suck. And when they – sometimes it’s directly measuring like the faster they suck, you know, the more of the stimulus they get. Sometimes it’s more of a criterion where if the sucking goes to below a certain rate then something would change. So, it’s done in a couple different ways with the sucking procedures.  

I think part of what’s going on is that the visual measures with eye trackers have become so much better than they were even a decade ago that the eye-tracking techniques have kind of taken over even with very young babies where sucking procedures and also brain imaging techniques as well although they’re much more expensive.  

The sucking techniques require a lot more training. Maybe not than the brain imaging. But the sucking techniques require a lot more skill and training and sort of the equipment setup is more complex than some of the – especially the newer eye-tracking packages that are fairly plug and play. So, I think there’s kind of a shift that’s happening in the research community away from the sucking techniques and there just aren’t as many labs that are sort of trained in those methods anymore.