Infant Development

Today we went up to UCSC to participate in an infant development study. It was interesting, I almost laughed out loud because I just didn't understand what they were doing. They were studying how infants between 2 and 18 months learn about height, or something like that. All I know is that if they started doing something weird, Matt instructed me to get out of there fast (being the Psychology major he was, he knew how these experiments could be, haha). I was holding Gianna on my lap and we were in front of a little stage. The curtain was raised and there was a litle box and a blue tube with about 5 little red cotton balls at the base of the tube. There was a little ding (like when you're trying to click on an icon that isn't opening for you) then a hand with a yellow rubber glove picks up the box, shows us that inside there are a couple of little stars, then it is placed on top of the tube, which is then pushed up and down. Then the box is placed back next to the tube and the curtain goes down. This happened about 10 times with different a couple of different sized boxes and a red tube instead of the blue one, I was somewhat distracted as I was trying to keep Ezra and Justus quiet at my side. Gianna was happily sucking on her hands the whole time and only once looked away. When they squeaked a little toy, her attention was brought back to the stage (at least we know she's not deaf!). We were videotaped and it must be a pretty funny thing to watch as Ezra asked a couple of times, "what are they doing? why are they doing that?" Then, towards the end, he said he had to go pee. Anyway, not exactly sure what we contributed to the study, but I'm glad we were able to help out. Go slugs!