What’s going on in your baby’s brain?

We are running an exciting new study looking at how babies and toddlers develop what we call ‘Executive Functions’. Executive functions include important skills, such as keeping things in memory to solve a problem, stopping ourselves from habits and overcoming temptations, and juggling multiple activities at the same time. As you can imagine, very young children are not very good at these things! - but we believe that the very earliest EF development starts in toddlerhood, and we have been developing ways of measuring these skills using some new games (called ‘tasks’) – all designed with fun in mind.

We are looking for parents of children aged around 9-10 months of age to visit the Oxford University BabyLab for 4 study sessions with our new games. The study sessions will take place when your child is 10, 16, 24 and 30 months of age. During the sessions, we will be using safe, child-friendly ways to measure brain and heart activity whilst children complete the games. We will also collect cheek cell samples from both parents and children (with a soft swab that parents gently rub in their/their child’s mouth) to find out more about the genetic influences on executive functions. We aim to make the sessions a fun experience as well as an opportunity to gain a new perspective on the amazing changes your child is going through at this exciting time in their development.

You will be reimbursed for your time and effort and your child will receive a small BabyLab-branded gift for taking part.

To find out more about the study, please email infantandtoddlerattention@psy.ox.ac.uk or phone Dr Karla Holmboe on 07710 705 680 / 01865 281 380.

 Research Ethics Project Number: R57972_RE001