15  Apparatus

15.1 Room Set-Up

During the experiment, infants will be seated on their caregiver’s lap or in a high-chair or car seat1 in front of a screen. The optimal distance between the infant and the screen will depend on the size of the screen, and labs should use their normal testing set-up (if applicable).

1 Whichever option corresponds to a lab’s standard procedure for testing infants, as reported in the pre-data-collection survey

2 Please email us if you need guidance.

For labs unaccustomed to testing infants in a procedure like this, you can use a visual angle calculator to determine an optimal distance from the screen2.

Caution

ADD IN VISUAL ANGLE CALCULATOR INSTRUCTIONS

We encourage labs to follow their normal procedure for ensuring that parents do not influence their infant’s behavior during the experiment. This can include asking parents to wear blacked-out sunglasses, close their eyes, or look down at the infant (and not at the screen).

Stimlui will be presented on the screen according to the specifications in Chapter 14.

15.2 Equipment

The minimal equipment required to run this experiment is:

  • Computer running experiment software (see below)
  • Monitor/television for stimulus display (with audio capability to play music/attention-getter sounds)3
  • Camera for capturing infant looking behavior4
  • Mixer for syncing recording of infant looking with stimulus timing (or other method for doing so)

3 Can be a laptop screen, if needed (a large external screen is preferable)

4 This can be a scene view embedded in an eye tracker, or a webcam from a laptop.

Addional (optional) equipment:

  • Eye tracker
  • Blacked-out glasses for parent to wear during experiment
Caution

PUT IN GRAPHIC SHOWING APPARATUS/SET-UP

15.3 Software

To maximize accuracy, we encourage labs to use one of the following supported hardware/software options to run the experiment:

  • Eyetracking (Eyelink): Experiment Builder
  • Eyetracking (Tobii): PsychoPy
  • Offline coding: PsychoPy

We will provide experiment and order files to support these options. Let us know as soon as possible if you plan to use an alternative experiment program version not listed above.

Experiment files are in final development & testing

The estimated release date is June 15, 2026. Thank you for your patience!