How Psychologists Study Young Children

About the lecture

In this lecture, we think about how psychologists study young children, focusing in particular on: (i) the lack of physical and cognitive abilities of babies and young children, resulting in challenges in measuring changes in their physical and mental skills; (ii) looking preferences as a key measure of infant attention and recognition; (iii) high amplitude sucking as another test of infant attention and emotion; (iv) more advanced looking preference tests to register boredom, referred to as habituation, which are more able to be performed once the infant can sit up and move themselves around; (v) the ability of modern psychology to assess various cognitive processes in infants using biopsychological tools which can measure electrical activity and magnetic fields in the brain; (vi) understanding these recording tools as precursors to more accurate and complex tools like an fMRI scanner.

About the lecturer

Dr Ashok Jansari is a senior lecturer in the Department of Psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London. Dr Jansari’s research interests include memory disorders, prosopagnosia, executive functions, and synaesthesia. Dr Jansari is most famous for his research into prosopagnosia, having made numerous TV appearances, including on BBC1’s The One Show, as well as hosting his own ‘Neuro Talk’ YouTube channel:

https://www.youtube.com/c/DrAshokJansariNeuroTalk/featured

Some of Dr Jansari's recent publications include 'Acquired synaesthesia following 2C-B use' (2019), 'Using virtual reality to investigate multitasking ability in individuals with frontal lobe lesions' (2019), and 'Identification from CCTV: Assessing police super-recogniser ability to spot faces in a crown and susceptibility to change blindness' (2018).