The Early Childhood Cognition Lab
at the University of Washington
As adults, we are adept at explaining and understanding the behavior of other people around us. Critical to this process is our ability to think about our own and other people's actions as guided or motivated by goals or intentions. For instance, upon seeing a woman reach toward a cookie jar, we go beyond focusing on the surface properties of the act (e.g., the speed and trajectory of the woman's reach) to interpret this action as directed toward the goal of obtaining a cookie. Our tendency to view action as motivated by goals is a powerful tool in our ability to navigate our social environment. It enables us to monitor and modify our own behavior, to predict the outcome of the actions of others, and to both teach and learn a variety of activities and skills. At the ECCL, we are interested in exploring the origins of the ability to represent human action in terms of goals and intentions. We do this by inviting infants and children (accompanied by their parents) to play age-appropriate and child-friendly games with us.
Browse our website to find out more about our research, who we are, and how you can participate in our studies at the Early Childhood Cognition Lab. At the end of each quarter, we post a newsletter with updates on our projects.
If you have questions, please contact us by phone (206-616-6770) or by email, eccl@u.washington.edu. We look forward to hearing from you!
News
Research presented at the Northwest Cognition and Memory (NOWCAM) Conference in Seattle, June 26-28, 2008
Understanding agency in the first year of life.
Blumenthal & Sommerville
The development of infants understanding of the causal statof an event.
Davison, Blumenthal, & Sommerville
Learning and application of tool use in ten-month-old infants. Harmon, Skinner, Braun, Venema, & Sommerville
Active versus passive preference understanding in infancy.
Shin, Blumenthal, Venema, & Sommerville
