News!
BONDS "Live Study" is published
We are so happy to announce that the results of our Live Study are out!
Lots of thanks again to all families who participated in this study, in which we recorded (and analysed in real-time) infants' brain activity while they were watching a researcher exposing different behaviours varying in vocal content and gaze direction.
Find the full article here.
Find a summary of the results under Tasks and Results > Live Task.
[September 2023]
Antonia Jordan-Barros joined the BONDS team as new PhD student
Antonia is doing her PhD at Birkbeck, and is supervised by Prof. Emily Jones and Dr. Anna Gui as well as Prof. Robert Leech (King's College London) and Silvia Dalvit (BabyBrains).
Together with Francesca, she is now welcoming our families who take part in the Gaze-Emotion study.
She will then expand the BONDS project to studying toddlers, with a focus on comparing neurotypical with autistic toddlers.
Welcome on board, Antonia, we are glad to have you!
[September 2023]
Our very own Elena obtained her PhD with a thesis on the BONDS project!
We are so so proud of you, Dr. Throm!!!
Huge congratulations from all your colleagues, and from all baby scientists and families who took part in the study!
[July 2023]
New BONDS workshop!!!
We are excited to announce our next BONDS workshop in collaboration with BabyBrains!
If you have participated in the BONDS study, make sure you scan the QR code and join us to discover what we have learnt from BONDS study!
For new Families, please Sign up and Come along to our event full of games, fun and science!
[June 2023]
Upcoming BONDS workshop for the whole family
If you have participated in the BONDS study, make sure you check your emails!
We sent you an invitation to a fun-packed workshop for you and your children, prepared in partnership with BabyBrains, the platform for empowering parents through science, to tell you a little bit about what we learnt from the BONDS study.
Please come along - use the online form provided in the email to sign up!
[January 2023]
New PhD student joined the BONDS team
Francesca Penza is doing her PhD at Birkbeck, supervised by Prof. Emily Jones, and she is going to meet the wonderful families who take part in the BONDS study from November '22! We are delighted to have Francesca on board, she has A LOOOOT of experience working with children and families both as a school teacher and as an experimenter at the Babylab, and she is just such a lovely person. Welcome Francesca!!!
[November 2022]Live Chat with Dr. Anna Gui on the BabyBrains Youtube channel about the BONDS study
How do babies come to detect what they actually prefer from the myriad of options available? How can we use science to get to know more about what a baby likes?
On the 21st of October 2022 at 12, our very own Anna of the BONDS team chats about this with Dr Silvia Dalvit, co-founder of BabyBrains - The Science of Parenting.
If you missed it, you can watch it now!
New funded PhD position from September 2023 to continue the BONDS study during parent-child interaction
The BONDS team received funding from the Medical Research Council to have a PhD student for the next 4 years carrying on the BONDS study with new exciting experiments that will shed light on what is it that children really like when interacting with their parents.
The PhD project will be carried on in collaboration with the BabyBrains company, which does a great job conveying new scientific discoveries about early development to parents and families! To know more about BabyBrains, check out their website here: https://www.babybrains.info/
[September 2022]
To apply or to know more about the project, click here: https://www.uclbbk-mrcdtp.ac.uk/icase/mapping-attentive-brain-states-real-time-support-parent-child-interaction-autism
New Research Assistant on the BONDS study
Marian Aguilò Mayans has joined the team!
The BONDS study was recognised as one of the novel, exciting scientific projects by The London Interdisciplinary Doctoral network (LIDo) ! As a result, we had the amazing opportunity to have one of the selected LIDo students to work on BONDS for the summer, and Marian was just the perfect candidate for the job!
She is now continuing to work on BONDS as a Research Assistant, thanks to the award of the Research Innovation Fund received by the BONDS team. If you come for a visit, you'll be lucky to meet this clever, funny and lovely researcher!
[July 2022]
New publication about the BONDS study is out on the scientific journal Infant and Child Development
"Babies are always more trouble than you thought, and more wonderful!" - with this quotation from writer Charles Osgood, the BONDS team addressed colleague researchers working with infants to understand more about the brain and psychological development. In this commentary, they explain how the BONDS approach solves some of the usual "troubles" researchers encounter when testing infants, by presenting little ones with engaging and personalised experiments tailored just on their preference!
Here are the details and link to the paper: Gui A., Throm E.V., da Costa P.F., Haartsen R., Leech R., Jones E.J.H. (2022), Proving and improving the reliability of infant research with Neuroadaptive Bayesian Optimization, Inf. Child. Dev., e2296. https://doi.org/10.1002/icd.2323
[March 2022]