Project Overview
- Status: Collecting data (sign up here)
- Stage 1 Registered Report given ‘In Principle Acceptance’ at Developmental Science
In this ongoing project we investigate an ability that lies at the heart of cognition: to learn and to apply rules. We ask whether infants (from 5 to 12 months-old) can learn abstract algebraic rules over patterned syllable sequences and generalize those rules to novel syllable sequences. Despite the large research effort on the topic, questions remain about the robustness of the core finding, as many studies failed to find significant learning effects. We believe that a multi-lab approach with a large and diverse sample of infants has the potential to uncover whether and to what extent this core cognitive ability is available in young infants and how it varies across age and different developmental circumstances.
Leads
- Ingmar Visser, University of Amsterdam, Netherlands [email]
- Claartje Levelt, Leiden University, Netherlands [email]
- Melanie Soderstrom, University of Manitoba, Canada [email]
- Andreea Geambasu, Leiden University, Netherlands [email]
Links
- Materials, Protocols, and Documentation: MB3-OSF
- Lab Manual: link
- Data and code: MB3-GitHub
- Listserv: join here
- Slack: MB workspace (join the #mb3-general channel)
Contributors
- For a detailed index of collaborators (+ institutions, countries, studies), see the MB collaborator dashboard.
We encourage everyone who is interested in the project to contact the Project Leads (see above) or fill out the MB Sign-Up Form.
Please note that access to infants/infant lab is NOT a prerequisite.
Publications
Visser, I., Geambasu, A., Baumgartner, H. A., Bergmann, C., Byers-Heinlein, K., Carstensen, A., Doyle, F. L., Gervain, J., Hannon, E., Havron, N., Johnson, S., Kachergis, G., Kline Struhl, M., Kosie, J. E., Lew-Williams, C., Mayor, J., Moreau, D., Mueller, J., Raijmakers, M., Shukla, M., Tsui, A. S. M., Sirois, S., Westermann, G., Soderstrom, M., & Levelt, C. C. (Stage 1 Registered Report, In Principle Acceptance). ManyBabies 3: A multi-lab study of infant algebraic rule learning. Developmental Science. PsyArXiv. doi:10.31234/osf.io/aex7v
to cite, use (Visser et al., accepted pending data collection)