Project Overview

• Status: Finalizing design
• Stage 1 Registered Report is under review

Familiarity and novelty effects are the cornerstone of many infant behavioral methods (e.g., habituation, head-turn preference, preferential looking / looking-while-listening, eye tracking). In this ongoing project we investigate Hunter and Ames’ (1988) model of infants’ preference for familiar and novel stimuli. We aim to empirically test whether infant age, task difficulty, and familiarization time interact to predict the direction of infants’ preference for familiar vs. novel stimuli. By comprehensively testing the Hunter and Ames model, we will solidify our foundational understanding of infant curiosity and provide the most comprehensive, global picture of the early foundations of infant cognition to date.

---

Leads

• Jessica Kosie, Princeton University, US [email]
• Martin Zettersten, Princeton University, United States [email]
• Christina Bergmann, University of Applied Sciences, Germany & Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Netherlands [email]
• Dima Amso, Columbia University, United States [email]
• Casey Lew-Williams, Princeton University, United States [email]

---

Links

• Listserv: join here.
• Slack group: join here

---

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

Kosie, J. E.*, Zettersten, M.*, Abu-Zhaya, R., Amso, D., Babineau, M., Baumgartner, H. A., Bazhydai, M., Belia, M., Benavides-Varela, S., Bergmann, C., Berteletti, I., Black, A. K., Borges, P., Borovsky, A., Byers-Heinlein, K., Cabrera, L., Calignano, G., Cao, A., Cox, C. M. M., Dal Ben, R., Dautriche, I., DeBolt, M., Exner, A., Fisher-Thompson, D., Frank, M. C., Gönül, G., Gonzalez-Gomez, N., Grosse Wiesmann, C., Hamlin, J. K., Havron, N., Hochmann, J. R., Hoehl, S., Houston-Price, C., Kachergis, G., Kaldy, Z., Kingo, O. S., Ko, E. S., Kong, S. P., Krøjgaard, P., Liu, S., Lu, H. S., Maganti, M., Mather, E., Mayor, J., McMillan, B. T. M., Molnar, M. T., Moreau, D., Moriguchi, Y., Moulson, M. C., Mueller, J. L., Oakes, L. M., Peperkamp, S., Peykarjou, S., Pires, M. T., Raz, G., Requena, P. E., Rocha-Hidalgo, J., Saffran, J. R., Schaetz, C., Schuwerk, T., Shinskey, J. L., Simpson, E. A., Singh, L., Smolak, E., Soderstrom, M., Sonne, T., Ssemata, A. S., Visser, I., Von Holzen, K., Waxman, S. R., Westermann, G., White, K. S., Woodruff Carr, K. L., Zahner-Ritter, K., Zeidler, H., Zimmer, L., Zupan, Z., & Lew-Williams, C. (2023, August 31). ManyBabies 5: A large-scale investigation of the proposed shift from familiarity preference to novelty preference in infant looking time. (*co-first authors) PsyArXiv. doi:10.31234/osf.io/ck3vd

to cite, use (Kosie & Zettersten et al., under review)