Does a smartphone disrupt play time?

For full term babies aged between 9 and 10 months. The partaking parent needs to own and have access to a smartphone for the study.

In this study you will be asked to interact with your baby and at certain points during the interaction to carry out some simple tasks on your phone. One of these tasks will involve you making a call to a friend/family member where you talk about the most recent movie/TV series you watched and/or book you read, whilst interacting with your baby. Your baby will also be shown a short video to watch of an adult looking at some toys. Finally you will be asked to complete a short questionnaire about your general phone use.

Phones are embedded into our daily lives, but little is known about how a parent using a phone when interacting with their baby influences the interaction. We will be looking to see if phone use changes the way your baby looks at your face and follows where you are looking. For young babies, the parent's eyes are important for communication and we want to see whether babies will still focus on their parent's eyes if the parent is using a phone. This will help us to understand whether parents' using their phones during interactions with their baby may have an impact on their development.

35 - 40 minutes

You will receive either a $5 or £5 Amazon voucher on completion of the study. This will be sent via Lookit, we will first contact you to ask for your preference of currency. You will receive compensation within a week of completing the study. Please only complete the study once.