Professor peeks into minds of babies

Steven Adams/Tribune-Review

Amanda Cardillo holds on to her daughter, Kayleigh Byers, as the infant participates in a study of how children learn to perceive motion, at Carnegie Mellon University's Infant Cognition Lab.

Photos: Steven Adams/Tribune-Review

Assistant professor David Rakison plays with Kayleigh Byers after her mother, Amanda Cardillo, brought her into the Carnegie Mellon's Infant Cognition Lab. Kayleigh participated in a study of how children learn to perceive motion.

Graduate student Jessica Cicchino enters data while watching Kayleigh take part in the study.

Is your baby a scientist?

Psychologists at Carnegie Mellon's Infant Cognition Lab are recruiting babies ages 3 to 24 months for developmental research studies. They also want to hear from expectant parents. Parents would be with their babies during each study. All data collected are kept confidential. A typical visit to the lab lasts about 30 minutes. For more information, call 412-268-6122 or visit www.psy.cmu.edu/~rakison/labpage.html.

Kayleigh Byers sat enthralled by the TV screen for several minutes before her head nodded toward her chest and she began drooling -- a sure sign the 6-month-old had lost interest in the colorful shapes dancing in front of her.

Like all new parents, Amanda Cardillo, 20, of Homestead, wants to know what is going on inside her baby's head.

That's why Cardillo brought her daughter to the Infant Cognition Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University, where psychologist David Rakison studies how babies process information to make sense of how the world works.

"As humans, our knowledge extends way beyond any animal on the planet," said Rakison, an associate professor of psychology at CMU. "My passion is to discover how we develop that incredible knowledge, and studying babies is the best way to do that."

Studying babies is like studying the Big Bang of cognition -- it provides a window into the very earliest stages of knowledge acquisition before education and experience muddy the picture, Rakison said.

By understanding how babies think and learn, scientists can begin to understand how adult knowledge is structured and how people make decisions. And if they know how the minds of healthy babies function, it could be easier to figure out how children with cognitive disorders develop differently, said Rakison, who also is working with researchers at Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh to study autistic children.

Rakison's research focuses on infants' capacity to put related objects in categories. This basic cognitive skill is thought to be a crucial building block in our ability to create memory and organize information in meaningful ways.

For example, how and when do infants know that cars are objects, but a rhinoceros is an animal• Or that things with wheels, such as cars and wagons, roll along, while rhinos, turtles and other things with legs walk•

A native of London, Rakison, 36, of Shadyside, moved to the United States in 1996 to do his post-doctorate work at the University of Texas in Austin. He came to Carnegie Mellon five years later.

With his long, wavy black hair and goatee, Rakison looks more like a rock star than a university professor. And his lab resembles a nursery school classroom, rather than a place of cutting-edge psychological research. Even the windowsill of his office is littered with a menagerie of plastic animal figurines and a fleet of Hot Wheels.

Toys aside, doing research on babies isn't fun and games. It is a never-ending challenge to recruit busy parents, who often cancel their appointments, fail to show or just want to be assured their baby is destined for greatness.

Babies, of course, can be equally fussy. They don't always sit still. Sometimes they spit up or fall asleep mid-experiment.

Most importantly, they can't talk.

Psychologists have had to devise creative, labor-intensive techniques to figure out what infants might be thinking and how they are learning.

One method tracks a baby's eye movements as a measure of the child's interest.

By tracking how long an infant looks at an image on a computer monitor, Rakison can tell how long the baby remains interested in it. Boredom -- measured by decreased looking time -- is a sign that the baby has learned what he or she wants or needs to learn. Not surprisingly, babies who grow bored faster tend to have higher IQs later in life, Rakison said.

Psychologists can test to determine whether the infant notices a difference between a new image and one seen repeatedly. If the baby looks longer at the new image, then the child likely is placing it in a separate mental category. If the looking times are the same, however, the baby is lumping the images together in one group.

With older babies, Rakison also uses a method called sequential touching -- that is, the sequence in which a child touches various objects gives clues as to how they are being categorized.

The study that baby Kayleigh participated in last week is helping Rakison to determine how and when infants understand the difference between animate and inanimate objects. He suspects that babies who can crawl will have a greater capacity to make this distinction, although after studying about 35 infants with varying motor skills, this correlation hasn't proven true.

Rakison estimates that he and his students have tested more than 3,000 babies.

He has learned that infants in the second year of life still categorize objects on the basis of their appearance -- much later than psychologists had thought. For example, they group animals together because they all have legs, eyes and facial features rather than in some meaningful way such as "all animals are alive."

Rakison also has discovered that infants readily associate an object's features with its behavior -- for example, things with legs are self-propelled or things with mouths drink. Older children with autism behave similarly.

"Figuring out how we know what we know -- this is my real love," Rakison said.

At least for now, though, he isn't ready to continue his work at home. Rakison said he and his wife, veterinarian Dr. Caroline Simard, don't plan to have babies of their own soon.

"I think we'll start with a dog and go from there," he said.

Additional Information:

Is your baby a scientist?

Psychologists at Carnegie Mellon's Infant Cognition Lab are recruiting babies ages 3 to 24 months for developmental research studies. They also want to hear from expectant parents. Parents would be with their babies during each study. All data collected are kept confidential. A typical visit to the lab lasts about 30 minutes. For more information, call 412-268-6122 or visit www.psy.cmu.edu/~rakison/labpage.html.