[By: Linda]
In this blog post, I thought it would be nice to look back at the past six months. It has been a hectic but fun time. Every day I was lucky enough to work with cute little three-month-old infants. Although there were moments that were not as much fun, such as smelling like baby spit up almost every single day, I really enjoyed the testing period. It was a struggle to find enough three-month-olds for the entire lab, especially since so many of them would end up in my longitudinal study leaving only a few for other studies. We employed several strategies to get new infants to sign up. We planned talks for new parents at several popular locations among new parents. Hoping they would tell all the parents they knew about our study, we even went as far as telling parents how desperate we were and almost begged them to spread the word. In the end, we managed to get quite some infants to the lab. Just before the summer break, we tested infant number 72. This means we managed to get data from 144 testing sessions (pre-intervention and post-intervention measurements).
With only 24 more infants to go (yay!), I hope to finish pre-and-post testing somewhere around mid-September. This is an exciting time for not only me but also my supervisors. We finally get to look at the data and find out if we can really teach these young infants to reach for objects and what this means for their cognitive abilities.
I would like to mention how grateful I am to the parents that were part of our study. Not only did they come to the lab twice, they also completed an intense two-week training at home for us. This was not always easy as most of the infants did not care for the training. We hope that most of these parents will come back for the follow-up assessments that will start early October.