Publications

Publications using Lookit data

Here’s some of the research that’s come out of Lookit! There’s a lot more in prep, so if you’re interested in questions like whether someone’s tried X task on Lookit and how it went, we recommend asking in the #researchers channel on Slack for more up-to-date info.

  • Beckner, A.G., Voss, A.T., Oakes, L.M., Casasola, M. (2021, April). Assessing the robustness of the mental rotation change detection procedure: the importance of task and context. In symposium: Infants’ learning about object properties and categories in diverse environments. Symposium conducted at the biennial Society for Research in Child Development (Virtual).
  • Bochynska, A., Scott, K., and Dillon, M. (2021, April). Bringing home Baby Euclid: Evaluating infants’ basic shape discrimination using the online platform Lookit. In symposium: Infants’ learning about object properties and categories in diverse environments. Symposium conducted at the biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development (Virtual).
  • Casey, K., Scott, K., Ashton, K., Gill, J., Simpson, E., and Bayet, L. (2021, April). Neonatal imitation of caregivers at home: Pre-registered analyses. Poster at the biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development (Virtual).
  • Cassamajor, K., Chu, J., Scott, K., and Schulz, L. (2021, April). A large-scale study of infant intuitive physics. Poster at the biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development (Virtual).
  • Chalik (2021, April). Moral behavior within and across social groups. In J. Dunlea (Chair), The role of social relationships in shaping children’s socio-moral reasoning. Symposium conducted at the biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development (Virtual).
  • Casey K., Scott K., Ashton K., Gill J., Simpson E., & Bayet L. (2020) Neonatal imitation of caregivers: A feasibility pilot. The CogSci 2020 Virtual Conference.
  • Yoon, E. J., Frank, M. C. (2019). Preschool children’s understanding of polite requests. Proceedings of the 41st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. [pdf], [repository].

If you give a presentation or publish a paper using Lookit data, please share it here! You can propose that change directly or email lookit@mit.edu with the citation (and a PDF or video link if you want to share it here).

Original Lookit papers

These papers introduced a prototype of Lookit and reported on the initial test studies we ran. They may have helpful information about general considerations for unmoderated online research - e.g., do we basically see similar looking times even though the environment is noisier (spoilers: yes) and can you see where kids are looking from webcam (also yes)?

However, the platform itself has been completely re-engineered since these studies were conducted starting in 2014, so some of the details are no longer relevant - in particular, video quality is much better and we’re no longer collecting variable-framerate .flv files.

  • Scott, K. M. and Schulz, L. E. (2017). Lookit (part 1): a new online platform for developmental research. Open Mind 1(1):4-14. doi:10.1162/opmi_a_00002
  • Scott, K. M., Chu, J., and Schulz, L. E. (2017). Lookit (part 2): Assessing the viability of online developmental research, results from three case studies. Open Mind 1(1):15-29. doi:10.1162/opmi_a_00001