How will they use it?

This study is for 14- to 20-month-old babies.

Your baby will watch a series of short videos of a person using common objects, like cups and forks, in correct and incorrect ways. For example, sometimes the actress will bring the cup to her mouth and sometimes she will bring the cup to her head. Each video will pause after the actress completes her action with the object for 30 seconds. This happens for each and every video. This may look like an error but it is by design! We want to see which kind of events your child chooses to look at and for how long they look at them.

The purpose of this research is to better understand how young children expect that other people will use common objects. We are interested in whether they expect that people will use familiar common objects in typical or correct ways and are surprised when they see them use the objects in atypical or incorrect ways. Previous research has demonstrated that very young children begin acquiring culturally-specific standards of behavior such as the "right" way of using objects and the right word labels for objects. Less is known about how young children think about a variety of different common objects and how their age may relate to this. This study seeks to answer that question.

15-25 minutes

Within one week of your participation, we’ll email you a $10 Amazon.com gift card as a thank-you. To be eligible for the gift card your child must be in the age range for this study, you need to submit a valid consent statement, we need to see that there is a child with you, and your child cannot have participated before in the study. We will send a gift card even if you do not finish the whole study or we are not able to use your child's data.