Geänderte Inhalte

The COVID-19 pandemic massively changed the context and feasibility of developmental research. This new reality, as well as considerations about sample diversity and naturalistic settings for developmental research, highlights the need for solutions for online studies. In this article, we present e-Babylab, an open-source browser-based tool for unmoderated online studies targeted for young children and babies. e-Babylab offers an intuitive graphical user interface for study creation and management of studies, users, participant data, and stimulus material, with no programming skills required. Various kinds of audiovisual media can be presented as stimuli, and possible measures include webcam recordings, audio recordings, key presses, mouse-click/touch coordinates, and reaction times. An additional feature of e-Babylab is the possibility to administer short adaptive versions of MacArthur–Bates Communicative Development Inventories (Chai et al. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 63, 3488-3500, 2020). Information pages, consent forms, and participant forms are customizable. e-Babylab has been used with a variety of measures and paradigms in over 12 studies with children aged 12 months to 8 years (n = 1516). We briefly summarize some results of these studies to demonstrate that data quality, participant engagement, and overall results are comparable between laboratory and online settings. Finally, we discuss helpful tips for using e-Babylab and present plans for upgrades.

Gaze following – infants’ orienting towards an object attended to by their social partner – has been linked to a range of socio-cognitive skills. Despite considerable research on when infants follow the gaze of their social partners, studies have typically examined infants’ following of adults’ gaze. Therefore, little is known about whether or how gaze following is modulated by the characteristics of the model, such as their age. The current study examined infants’ following of the gaze of an actor that varied in age: an adult, a young child, and an infant. In an eyetracking study, 49 infants, aged 6–14 months, were presented with videos in which the actor (either an adult, a child or an infant) first looked down towards a neutral point on the table, then to the participant with a friendly facial expression, and then to one of two novel objects to the left and right of the table. The age of the actor did not predict participants’ gaze following behaviour, with participants following the gaze of the adult, child and same-aged peer. Thus, gaze following is not constrained to interactions with an adult. Furthermore, participants showed high interest in the actors’ faces which was the strongest for the infant actor followed by the child actor, and the adult actor. These results shed insight into the interaction between infants’ gaze following behaviour and their attentional preferences for different social partners. We discuss the implications of these findings for theories of development: Beyond adults, other infants and children are also perceived as interesting social partners and, potentially, valuable sources of information.