Experimentation on babies

Earlier this week, we hauled The Girl up to campus so she could take part in a little experiment that the psychology department is running. Don’t worry, no mazes or shock treatments were involved – just monitoring of the blood flow in her wee little head.

The research project is focused on language development in infants. Basically they’re trying to find out when, how and to what degree infants can distinguish differences in spoken languages. To do that, they fit a headband around an infant’s head which monitors blood flow to various parts of the brain (similar to those pulse cuffs they put on your finger at the hospital) while they show a video with a simple story – once in English and once in Spanish.

Or so I’m told. Only one parent was actually allowed in the testing room and The Wife appointed herself as our family’s ambassador to science. The only thing that The Boy and I can actually verify is that the two of them went into a room with the researchers for about ten minutes and that most of the water fountains in the Psychology Building don’t work. And The Girl received a free toy for her efforts.

The Wife reports that The Girl got pretty worked up and started cooing when the video was shown in Spanish. I’m not exactly sure what that means. We may be speaking the wrong language at home and I just don’t know it.

I’m also not exactly sure why the psychology department is conducting these experiments. If language development in infants falls under the umbrella of psychology, then what in the hell does our College of Education and Human Development do? Maybe the whole baby thing was just a red herring and they were secretly studying how The Boy and I would react to all those broken water fountains.

Fries at the bottom of the bag

• I’ve decided that it’s a given that if one of your children is happy to be going somewhere, the other one won’t be.
• The Boy drew a quick sketch of a baseball field which may explain his unique approach to base running.
• The Girl’s new fascination with rolling over has resulted in some frustration when it comes to playing with some of her toys.
• I don’t mean to brag (actually I do), but how cute is this?
• A sure sign of the apocalypse: ads for “Matt Lauer games” on Facebook
• Another sign of the apocalypse: High School Musical On Ice at my alma mater
• April is over, so that means the April 2008 Photo Gallery is complete