Measuring Babies’ Surprise with Simultaneous Video Presentation

4 to 12 months

In this study, your baby will watch short, colorful videos featuring simple objects and geometric cartoon characters moving around. In each pair of videos, something slightly different happens—one video shows an event that makes sense according to everyday physics or social rules, while the other shows something surprising. For example, in an expected video, your baby might see a blue ball roll across a platform and stop at the edge. In the unexpected version, the blue ball rolls right off the edge, but instead of falling, it stays floating in midair. We’ll play two videos side by side, and your baby can look freely at whichever one they find more interesting. The video portion takes about 12 minutes, and the entire study lasts around 15 minutes. You’ll simply help your baby sit comfortably and watch, while we record where they look to learn which types of events capture their attention most.

Previous research with babies has often measured how long they look at a single moving video, or which of two still pictures they prefer to look at. But surprisingly, there hasn’t been much research showing babies two moving videos at once! In this study, we present two videos side by side—one showing an event that makes sense, and one showing something unexpected—and see which one your baby prefers to watch. If babies tend to look longer at the unexpected event, this would show that showing two videos at once is a powerful new way for researchers to study how babies understand the world around them.

15 minutes

We will provide $5 Amazon (Amazon.com) gift card as a thank you for your baby's participation. Your gift card will arrive in your inbox within 3 business days. You will receive the gift card as long as your child is in the correct age range for the study, and your child needs to be visible at some point during the study's video section. Your child can only participate in the study once; multiple participations will not result in multiple payments.