Pick up a daily newspaper.
Turn on the evening news. Flip through any parenting
magazine.
You’re bound to come across reports such as “new
research shows that experience with music is important
for brain development” or “a study reveals
that children can understand the difference between
right and wrong at a much earlier age than we thought.”
At The University of Iowa, researchers make exactly
these types of discoveries in the Children’s
Research Laboratory. Housed in Spence Laboratories,
the research laboratory is made up of the labs of
several psychology professors who share a common
interest in figuring out how human beings develop.
The professors also share a giant database of the
names of every child born in Johnson and Linn counties.
Thousands of area children come to the Children’s
Research Laboratory each year to participate in studies.
Children—from infants to adolescents—spend
time in the labs playing with toys, watching pictures
on a monitor, pointing out and naming objects, talking,
and moving, while video cameras and copious note
takers observe.
Developmental psychologists joined forces to open
the research lab in the early 1990s. Jodie Plumert,
professor of psychology in the College of Liberal
Arts and Sciences and one of the lab’s first
researchers, says the basic goal has remained the
same—to learn more about how children develop.
Faculty members say they owe much of the success
of their research to two groups of people: their
research assistants and the families who participate
in the studies.
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| John
Spencer, associate professor of psychology,
watches 4-year-old Alison Luck play in Spencer’s
spatial planning and memory lab. Spencer is investigating
how people maintain location information in working
memory. Alison is the daughter of Spencer’s
fellow psychology faculty members, Lisa Oakes
and Steven Luck. For more information about participating
in a child research study, contact the psychology
department at (33)5-2419 or e-mail Lisa Oakes
at lisa-oakes@uiowa.edu. To learn more about
each researcher and specific studies, go to www.psychology.uiowa.edu/research.html and click on a researcher’s name; most
researchers have their own web pages. The psychology
department web site lists researchers and lab
projects in six training areas, including developmental
psychology; behavioral and cognitive neuroscience;
clinical psychology; health psychology; cognition
and perception; and personality and social psychology.
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Graduate and undergraduate assistants are involved
in all parts of the research, from testing children
to coding data and even designing studies.
“It’s an outstanding opportunity for
students to get hands-on experience with research,” Plumert
says. “Our developmental psychology program
has been ranked among the top undergraduate programs
in the country. One reason for that may be the strong
involvement of undergrads in our research.”
Researchers also heap praise on their young participants’ parents.
In most cases, the compensation isn’t much
more than a small toy and a “thank you.” Without
parents’ willingness or their time and effort,
these studies simply wouldn’t be possible,
says Lisa Oakes, professor of psychology.
Oakes and several other researchers even sign up
their own children for one another’s studies.
“One thing that happens, I think, is that
parents think it’s fun to know that their baby—who
means the world to them—is also so important
to someone else,” Oakes says.
The following is a list of developmental researchers
involved with the Children’s Research Laboratory,
along with information about their specific interest
areas:
• Grazyna Kochanska, professor of psychology,
follows the same group of children from infancy to
school-age, focusing on early development of conscience—how
children come to distinguish between right and wrong,
cultivate feelings of guilt and empathy, and behave
according to family rules.
• Bob McMurray, assistant professor of psychology,
works with a range of subjects, from infants to adults,
examining language perception and how humans develop
particular speech sounds and speech categories. The
research may help educators better teach language
skills and diagnose language problems earlier.
• Oakes explores how babies make sense of
the world—how they grow from a newborn bombarded
with new sights and sounds to a 14-month-old who
points to a furry thing and says “cat.” Oakes
tracks how much a baby can remember and how that
ability changes over time.
• Plumert looks at factors that put children
at risk for bicycling accidents; her child safety
research determines what sort of immature cognitive
skills put children in danger. Understanding that
could help parents better understood how to keep
their children accident-free.
• Larissa Samuelson, assistant professor of
psychology, focuses on the way toddlers learn to
name and categorize new kinds of objects, and how
they figure out the difference between a “solid” and
a “nonsolid” based on shape, texture,
color, and what they already know about familiar
objects.
• John Spencer, associate professor of psychology,
studies how children remember where objects are located
and how these memory abilities change with age. His
research projects cover memory, attention, and motor
control development.
• Scott Robinson, associate professor of psychology,
researches the development of motor abilities in
premature and full-term newborn infants in University
of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics. His specific research
interests include sensation and learning in the womb,
neural and biomechanical control, and development
and evolution of action.
As the newest member of the Children’s Research
Lab team, McMurray appreciates his UI colleagues’ particular
take on developmental research.
“People here are focused not so much on describing
what young kids do at ages 4, 5, and 6, and how they
change over time, as on figuring out what processes
are responsible for that change,” McMurray
says. “It’s really a dynamic atmosphere
here, working with people on the cutting edge in
the field.”
by Amy Schoon
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