We are developing an online laboratory, “Lookit,” where parents and children can participate in developmental research from home by completing an activity in a web browser while the child’s responses are recorded via webcam. This work aims to mitigate practical constraints on the questions researchers can answer about how children learn by making it easier to collect larger and more representative samples, work with special populations, or run longitudinal studies as needed.
Understanding the development of intelligence in a human infant is a key project of CBMM. This project engages the fundamental tradeoff between nature and nurture, or priors and data, and ultimately the origin of priors—how constraints are selected by evolution, encoded in genes, and instantiated in genetically wired brain circuits.