[Dr. Soderstrom:] So this was a study that was originally developed by a researcher named Kiley Hamlin and what she was able to show was that infants would prefer shapes that were behaving in a way that was kind of a nice way of behaving over shapes that were behaving in a mean way. So, it was a way of being able to show that fairly young infants have this – some sort of degree of moral understanding. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
[Researcher talking to parent:] Basically, she is going to be watching videos in whatever comfortable position you want to be in as long as she is just facing that middle screen, she\u2019s good to go. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
[Dr. Soderstrom:] So, in this case what we do is the babies come in and the mother just closes her eyes so she doesn\u2019t see the visual display. And the baby\u2019s sitting on the mom\u2019s lap and then there\u2019s a visual \u2013 a video of a shape trying to get up a little hill and then you have two other shapes. One of the shapes is kind of pushing the original shape up the hill. That\u2019s the helper shape. And then there\u2019s a hinderer shape that pushes the shape down the hill. And then after they\u2019ve accumulated a certain amount of looking to the videos and after they habituate to a certain amount to the videos to show that they\u2019ve gotten what they want to out of it, then we do a test where we actually present a live three dimensional choice for them of the helper and the hinderer shapes and see which one they prefer to touch. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
[Researcher talking to parent:] The second section of this study is a little more particular. So, it\u2019s only sixty seconds to choose a toy. So I\u2019m going to come in with a choice board with two real life versions of the shapes from the videos that she just watched and I\u2019m just to going basically see which one she wants to choose to play with. So this one has a bit more of a specific seating position that I\u2019m going to ask you to be in. So, I\u2019m just going to ask that you sit with both of your feet together and your knees together. You\u2019re going to hold her equally between both knees. Instead of pulling her back, just have her with her legs dangling over the edge so that she can reach more easily towards the shape. And then just have your hands just around the rib cage. Sometimes if your holding around it\u2019s a little bit harder for her to reach as well. So, it\u2019s just important during these sixty seconds that you are just being very conscious not to distract her, talk to her and that you are just kind of being her chair. So, try not to position her once you\u2019re in that first position. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
[Researcher talking to baby:] <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Look <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hi <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hi <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hi <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Look <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hi <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hi <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hi <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Who do you like? <\/p>\n\n\n\n
We picked the blue one pretty fast. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Oh, we got the whole thing. Good job! <\/p>\n\n\n\n
[Dr. Soderstrom:] And that\u2019s actually a really challenging thing with babies, especially the younger babies who might be reaching with both hands. So, there\u2019s quite a careful articulation of what counts as a choice. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Of course, it\u2019s very important in these studies that the infant\u2019s preference is not based on a preference for a triangle or a square but actually based on the videos that they were watching. So, there are a number of things done to prevent those biases. One of them is that they \u2013 when the original shapes were designed there was a lot of work put into making sure that they were equally salient or interesting to the babies in terms of their colours and their size and everything. And then in the design of the experiment, we make sure that for some babies it\u2019s the square that\u2019s the helper and for some babies, it’s the triangle that\u2019s the helper. And also, the researcher is blind to which shape is the helper or the hinderer in that particular study. So, in fact, we don\u2019t even know which, whether it\u2019s the square or the triangle that was helper or the hinderer until after we do the data analysis. It gets recorded by the computer but we don\u2019t look at those data until all of the data have been collected. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
And then since that original study emerged there\u2019s been attempts to replicate it. Some of them have been successful and some of them haven\u2019t. So, this research endeavour now is trying to do a larger scale replication because this particular protocol is actually really challenging to do and so when other laboratories were having trouble replicating one important possibility is just that they weren\u2019t doing it right. So Kylie is \u2013 and some other researchers like Kelsey Lucca and others have been sort of championing developing the protocol in a way that lots of laboratories can learn to do and so you can have a much larger scale replication effort where people are actually being trained by the original researchers and we can see – can this \u2013 how well does this replicate outside of those original laboratories. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
[Dr. Soderstrom:] So this was a study that was originally developed by a researcher named Kiley Hamlin and what she was able to show was that infants would prefer shapes that were behaving in a way that was kind of a nice way of behaving over shapes that were behaving in a mean way. So, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"template-text-only.php","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1862","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1862","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1862"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1862\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1863,"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1862\/revisions\/1863"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/content.scienceofecd.com\/transcript\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1862"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}