Fashion Detectives: How Babies Use Clothing as a Social Signal

For babies aged 5 to 7 months old who hear mainly English (over 80% of the time) and do not hear Japanese or Portuguese in their household, and reside in the US or CA; each child may participate in this study only once.

This study will take place during a live video call with a researcher. You will need to share your screen during the video call. Clicking the “Schedule a time to participate” button will take you to an online calendar where you can choose a date and time that works for your family. During the Zoom session, the researcher will send you a link in the Zoom chat that opens a short presentation with the videos your baby will watch. The presentation needs to play on your screen so your baby can see it clearly. The researcher will control the presentation, but we will ask you to share your screen so we can make sure the videos are playing correctly and that everyone is viewing the same thing at the same time. For this reason, it is important that your computer settings allow screen sharing. Your baby will watch short videos of women wearing traditional clothing who speak Portuguese and Japanese, so it is important that your baby does not regularly hear Japanese or Portuguese at home. We are interested in seeing which person your baby looks at longer. This helps us learn more about how babies pay attention to how people look and how they speak.

This study asks whether babies use style of dress to form expectations about people, such as whether they share other meaningful qualities. By answering this question, we hope to learn more about how early in life humans begin to look for signals of group membership and use those signals to understand the social world around them.

30 minute appointment

We will email you a $15 Amazon.com gift card as a token of appreciation. You will receive your eGift card within 48 hours of study participation. We provide one gift card per eligible child participating in the study.