OCW brings the MIT classroom to you in your home. Now a new project from the Department of Brain and Cognitive Science, Lookit, brings the MIT lab into your home. The Lookit project comes from MIT’s Early Childhood Cognition Lab, led by Prof. Laura Schulz. This article in Boston Magazine describes the online experiments:

Using a webcam recording, the lab at MIT can reliably determine whether a child is looking to the left or right of the monitor or looking away entirely. Reps at MIT note that although online testing doesn’t completely replace a traditional lab environment, researchers can still learn a lot from this way of conducting studies.

“What we’re really trying to do here is to harness the power of parents as citizen scientists,” says Kim Scott, Lookit project leader and Schulz laboratory graduate student. “As parents we observe and wonder about our kids all day.” Continue reading…

Prof. Schulz’s course Infant and Early Childhood Cognition is available on OCW for you to peruse if you’d like to learn more about her teaching and research.