April 3, 2000 - Monday
This morning Harry participated in an experiment at a local college. We, the parents of Harry, received a letter a couple of weeks ago asking for volunteers. They got our address from local birth records in the area and were looking for infants between 3-18 months. Of course, Harry now fits that category and since I've maintained a fascination about how he and other babies learn, it seemed like a good idea to help out.

Harry was actually the first baby to try a new study in which they placed two objects at a time in a little puppet stage-like environment, lifted the curtain, and then watched Harry's eye movements. As expected, he looked back and forth at the two objects. They reversed them and he did the same again. The real test was to see if an infant Harry's age would see a multiple colored object as one or more things. They showed him two objects, one of which was distinctly two different colors, top and bottom to see if Harry would look up and down at the different color parts of the two-colored object.

Unfortunately, Harry was getting a little bored with the lack of personal interaction by the time they got past the setup phase of the experiment and onto the real test phase, so it's a little hard to tell whether he was looking at the two-colored objects as two things or not. Perhaps they'll learn more once they watch the video tape of Harry's eyes. The women running the experiment seemed to decide mostly that they needed to shorten the test so that their future subjects would not become as unfocused during the important conclusion. When the study is finished, they promised to send me the results. But, of course, by that time Harry will be well past this age and I'll probably be less interested.

When we got home, Harry began another interesting behavior of twisting his body. He's shown little hints of this over the last couple of weeks, but today for the first time he remained in a contorted position for several minutes. I think he's starting to think about rolling over.


Comments, opinions?