The Emory Child Study Center is seeking children — infants through adolescent age — for a variety of research studies focusing on how kids think, learn and remember.
Studies typically take a couple of hours and usually consist of one or two visits.
If you decide that you are interested in participating, the Emory Child Study Center will enter your family’s information into their child research database and then you will then be contacted when your child is the correct age for a specific study they’re doing, tell you more about that specific study, and ask you whether you’d like to schedule a time to participate.
If you would like to join the contact list, please send visit this website at http://psychology.emory.edu/home/about/child-study.html and you will be added to a confidential database.
Susan E. Perlman, program coordinator, emphasized those who sign up are under no obligation to participate, and they can decide based on whether the time of study was convenient, and the study topic is of interest.
More about the Emory Child Study Center:
The Emory Child Study Center studies language, learning, memory, and questions such as how children understand space and numbers. The Center also investigates the role that brain development plays in child development. Emory University researchers study how children learn and develop by watching and interacting with children and their parents. For instance, they might use puppets to play a word game with a preschooler, show a toddler a toy and watch how she discovers what it does, or ask what a child remembers about a picture or story book. Each study is carefully planned and many studies are designed to be like games and/or activities for children.
Examples of past studies they’ve done in the past:
Infant Perception of Looming Stimuli: For this project, researchers study how infants perceive different looming objects. Children watch a short video that involves different animals growing larger as if they are approaching. The animals include bunnies, snakes, spiders and butterflies. (Previous research has shown that infants of this age are not afraid of these animals but they do pay attention to them.)
Imaging Emotion and Memory with Event-Related Potentials (ERPs): A major theme of the study in the Center's lab focuses on emotion. Specifically, how does emotion affect the life of a memory? And how does emotional memory change over the life of an individual? To address this question, researchers present participants with emotional stimuli (such as pictures) or ask children about emotional experiences from their own lives, examining how the processes of encoding and retrieval might differ for emotional versus non-emotional stimuli.
If have any other questions, you can contact Susan Perlman at childstudies@emory.edu or call 404-727-7432.
Note: Each child receives a small gift (a toy) for participating. Some studies provide gift cards between $5 and $30 per session. The Center emphasizes that they don't compensate for participation but rather give small gifts and gift cards as a token of appreciation for families who contribute their time to research. The Center also provides families with free parking and babysitting service in the case parents bring other siblings who are not involved in the studies.
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