In the Bama Baby Lab, we study infant learning during the first three years of life. Even before infants begin pre-school, they master a remarkable array of foundational skills. They learn hundreds of words, acquire motor skills like walking, produce gestures to communicate, and play with objects in sophisticated ways. Is infants’ learning across domains related?

 

Using laboratory experiments and "day-in-the-life" style observations of infants at home, our research documents how: (1) Infants actively construct their own learning environments; (2) New skills—like learning to point, walk, or say “yes” and “no”—influence many other domains of infant learning; (3) Delays or difficulty in one domain can effect infants’ other emerging skills. We study variability in developmental processes in neurotypical infants, autistic infants, and infants with language delay.