FAQ
Simply sign-up using the top menu. We will add you to our contact database using the information you give us and contact you when your children are eligible for our studies. Only members of the Infant and Child Development Group will have access to your information, contact information will only be used to schedule appointments, and you may request to be removed from our system at any time.
We normally schedule appointments for 30 minutes. Many of our studies are much shorter, taking between 5 and 15 minutes on average. We schedule for a full half-hour to allow time for parking and to answer any questions you or your child may have. Your child may also have the opportunity to participate in multiple studies within one appointment if the studies are brief and they wish to do so.
Yes! Please let us know ahead of time any children and their ages before the appointment and we will always try and have studies for them too! If there are no studies available, or a child wouldn’t like to participate, we always have our friendly research assistants available to babysit in our fun waiting room.
You and your children have the opportunity to meet real scientists and contribute to their ongoing research, and learn about the field of developmental psychology. Your children always get to pick out age-appropriate prizes to thank them for their help. These range from onesies to t-shirts, rubber duckies to frisbees! We also offer free parking, however, we do not offer monetary compensation for participation.
All of the studies in our labs are intended to look at overall trends among infants and children of specific age groups rather than the behavior of each individual child. There are no right or wrong answers and all children think differently, so the activities we do are not an evaluation of your child’s ability in any way. Rather, their responses will contribute to what we know about children their age as a whole. The researchers are also happy to answer any general questions you might have about how children learn and understand the world.
All the information we obtain from your child’s session will be kept entirely confidential. Each child’s data will be assigned a code number (rather than their name) and only the experimenters associated with the project will have access to the information. When we write up reports, they will never mention individual children or any other identifying information.
All five labs are located in the Sheffield Sterling Strathcona Hall on Yale’s campus at 1 Prospect Street, New Haven, CT 06511. Please see our directions section for more details.
Children can always stop at any point and still receive prizes for their participation. Likewise if your baby gets fussy we will stop the study. We always want experiences in our labs to be fun and comfortable!
For parents of infants, you will remain with your child for the duration of the appointment. For older children, you will be able to watch the whole session either in person or via video feed.
By pressing on the “sign-up” tab and filling in your and your child’s information you will be added to our database and we will contact you about studies. Alternatively, you can send an email to infantandchild@yale.edu expressing your interest and we can sign you up from there.
We will match your availability with times that an experimenter is available but will always try and work around your schedule as much as possible. The only thing we encourage is you choose times when your child would not normally be hungry or need a nap.
All the labs have free parking available for parents. Either at a nearby parking lot or at a reserved parking meter on the street outside of our lab. Please see our directions section on the top menu for more details.