61 research outputs found
Building a collaborative Psychological Science: Lessons Learned from ManyBabies 1
The field of infancy research faces a difficult challenge: Some questions require samples that are simply too large for any 1 lab to recruit and test. ManyBabies aims to address this problem by forming large-scale collaborations on key theoretical questions in developmental science, while promoting the uptake of Open Science practices. Here, we look back on the first project completed under the ManyBabies umbrella—ManyBabies 1—which tested the development of infant-directed speech preference. Our goal is to share the lessons learned over the course of the project and to articulate our vision for the role of large-scale collaborations in the field. First, we consider the decisions made in scaling up experimental research for a collaboration involving 100+ researchers and 70+ labs. Next, we discuss successes and challenges over the course of the project, including the following: protocol design and implementation, data analysis, organisational structures and collaborative workflows, securing funding, and encouraging broad participation in the project. Finally, we discuss the benefits we see both in ongoing ManyBabies projects and in future large-scale collaborations in general, with a particular eye toward developing best practices and increasing growth and diversity in infancy research and psychological science in general. Throughout the article, we include first-hand narrative experiences to illustrate the perspectives of researchers playing different roles within the project. Although this project focused on the unique challenges of infant research, many of the insights we gained can be applied to large-scale collaborations across the broader field of psychology
Quantifying Sources of Variability in Infancy Research Using the Infant-Directed-Speech Preference
Psychological scientists have become increasingly concerned with issues related to methodology and replicability, and infancy researchers in particular face specific challenges related to replicability: For example, high-powered studies are difficult to conduct, testing conditions vary across labs, and different labs have access to different infant populations. Addressing these concerns, we report on a large-scale, multisite study aimed at (a) assessing the overall replicability of a single theoretically important phenomenon and (b) examining methodological, cultural, and developmental moderators. We focus on infants’ preference for infant-directed speech (IDS) over adult-directed speech (ADS). Stimuli of mothers speaking to their infants and to an adult in North American English were created using seminaturalistic laboratory-based audio recordings. Infants’ relative preference for IDS and ADS was assessed across 67 laboratories in North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia using the three common methods for measuring infants’ discrimination (head-turn preference, central fixation, and eye tracking). The overall meta-analytic effect size (Cohen’s d) was 0.35, 95% confidence interval = [0.29, 0.42], which was reliably above zero but smaller than the meta-analytic mean computed from previous literature (0.67). The IDS preference was significantly stronger in older children, in those children for whom the stimuli matched their native language and dialect, and in data from labs using the head-turn preference procedure. Together, these findings replicate the IDS preference but suggest that its magnitude is modulated by development, native-language experience, and testing procedure
Studying the reducing potencies of antioxidants with the electrochemistry inherently present in electrospray ionization-mass spectrometry
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Word Frequency Can Affect What You Choose to Say
Though communicative goals clearly drive word choice in
language production, online demands suggest that accessibility
might play a role, too. If the benefits of accessibility are
important enough to communication, more accessible words
(high-frequency words) might be chosen over more accurate,
less accessible ones. We used a novel artificial language
learning paradigm to test whether high-frequency words are
preferred over low-frequency words at a cost of meaning
accuracy. Participants learned eight words which corresponded
to precise angles on a compass. On test trials, participants
viewed angles lying in-between two trained angles and were
asked to produce a word for the angle. Across two experiments,
we showed that participants extended their use of high-
frequency words to more distal angles compared to low-
frequency words. In cases of competition between high- and
low-frequency words, the former tended to win out even when
less accurate, suggesting that accessibility can compromise
some accuracy
A Setup for the Coupling of a Thin-Layer Electrochemical Flow Cell to Electrospray Mass Spectrometry
Lack of autoregulatory blood flow escape in the skin after infusion of therapeutic levels of noradrenaline through a microdialysis system in healthy volunteers
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Learning and generalizing associations between social cues and outcomes
To succeed in social situations, we must learn how social cues predict subsequent events. How do we quickly form associations between a variety of social cues, such as individuals signaling their current emotion state, and social outcomes? To address this question, we developed a task in which participants viewed images of individuals conveying different emotions and searched among these images to gain rewards. Rewards were associated with either individuals’ identities or emotion cues. Across four experiments (N=720), individuals learned about rewards more efficiently from individual identity cues versus a wide variety of emotion cues. Participants also generalized cue-outcome associations more easily for individuals versus emotions. Learning was worse if participants experienced a change in the association rule, especially when switching from learning individual-based associations to emotion-based associations. Overall, we show that social cue type influences how associations between cues and rewards are learned, with implications for understanding learning in social contexts
ManyBabies5: A large-scale, collaborative investigation of the the Hunter & Ames Model of infant looking preference
Investigating the relationship between infant learning and measured effect size in preferential looking paradigms
Investigating the relationship between infant learning and measured effect size in preferential looking paradigms
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