Babylab at Oxford Brookes University
Psychology A Level students visited an innovative laboratory at Oxford Brookes University focusing on the development of babies and children. Read a report from Philippa, Year 12, below.
On Wednesday 27th June we visited the Babylab at Oxford Brookes University.
Dr Nayeli Gonzalez-Gomez, who specialises in understanding language acquisition and speech perception in infants, toured us around the lab.
We started with a fun quiz about language diversity, bilingualism and language development and learned lots about how language is studied in psychology.
It helped us look at how researchers study concepts in Psychology and gave us a glimpse into psychological and scientific research as a career.
Dr Gonzalez-Gomez also talked about her upcoming research project where she’s hoping to improve language development in premature babies through recreating the sounds foetuses normally hear when in the mother’s womb and playing them to the premature babies in the incubator.
This helped in teaching us about the implications and wider use of Psychological research in improving everyday life.
We had the exciting opportunity to look around the psychology lab where we came across the research equipment used to study infants, this included the baby eye tracker which allows researchers to see exactly where the child is looking on the screen so they are able to test the child’s vocabulary.
There was also a room with a one-way mirror which is used to study infants’ behaviours through covert observation.
This was really interesting to see in real life after learning about it theoretically in psychology lessons.
