You can sign up for a remote study by clicking on the sign up button provided on the Virtual Lab page to submit an interest form. In the interest form, you can provide us with your contact information and information about the age of your child or children. If you express interest in one of our remote studies, we will send you detailed information about our studies and your participation.
Our studies are designed to be as close as possible to studies that we have experience doing in person. Unmoderated studies are done completely in your browser, without the supervision of our researchers. For unmoderated studies, completing the consent form will lead to a link that you can click on to be taken directly to the study. Moderated studies are conducted over Zoom with a researcher. For moderated studies, completing the consent form will take you to a calendar where you can sign up for a time slot with a researcher. For either type of study, we ask that you do not assist your child with the tasks. We are interested in what your child thinks, and there are no right or wrong answers!
Your webcam will be used only for us to code our data. We need webcam information in order to make sure that your child’s responses are recorded correctly. If you are asked to allow us to record the study session, only our researchers will have access to the recordings. For moderated studies, you will have the option to expand the privacy level of your recording after the study is completed. For example, families may elect to allow a portion of their video to be shared at an academic conference. However, rest assured that our default setting is the highest privacy setting, with only trained researchers viewing the video for the purpose of describing the data.
We store all data on a secure, password-protected database, and the data are not linked to any identifiable information such as your name or your child’s name.
Each of our researchers has completed CITI training and Act 153 certifications in order to be cleared to work with children and will conduct studies ethically. All researchers work directly under the supervision of the principal investigators and have been trained to conduct studies with children. The studies on our website have all been approved by an institutional review board, which ensures that our methods are safe and participants are treated ethically. If you have further questions about safety, please email us at cogdevlab@andrew.cmu.edu.
We do not share the results of individual children. The purpose of these tasks is not to provide diagnoses or assessments of individual children, but rather to study children’s development as a whole. Based on established research practices, we report the results aggregated across all study participants. If you would like to know the results of a study once completed, you can take a look at our publications or our annual newsletter. Please note that publications may take months to years to be published, and not all studies may result in publications. If you have questions during a moderated study, you will have the opportunity to ask the researcher at the end of the session. Otherwise, please feel free to email us at cogdevlab@andrew.cmu.edu at any time if you have additional questions.