Research

How do young children learn to interact with their environment?

We are interested in how much young children understand about the physical and social world around them. Here are some of the questions that we are trying to answer in the Baby and Child Lab:

• How do children learn the properties of objects? How do they reason about objects that move out of sight?
• How do they communicate before fully mastering language? What role do gestures play in the development of communication?
• We are also interested in the development of handedness: how and why do children develop a preference for using one hand rather than the other to produce gestures and to manipulate objects?

To investigate these questions, we conduct studies with young children between approximately 1 and 5 years of age. We offer them different activities which take the shape of games and which are therefore set up to be fun and attractive. The observation of children's responses in these situations can help us find out how their knowledge develops over the first few years of life.