Our research focuses on investigating the development of children at different levels: behavioral, cognitive, neural, physiological and social. Developmental populations and toddlers in particular, may hardly comply with the requirements of conventional laboratory settings, where they are typically required to sit (sometimes still) in front of a computer screen. To this goal, we have equipped the ToddlerLab with wearable instrumentation and interactive labs to allow children to move freely and will less restraints. More importantly, the naturalistic labs give us the possibility to design more ecologically-valid and engaging experiments that are more similar to what children do in their everyday life (i.e. build a house with Duplo blocks). Therefore, tasks are a better model of real-world demands and we can thus study development more sensibly in more realistic scenarios.

When studying the children’s cognitive development, it is important to study the “body” as a whole and track changes at different levels: physiological, behavioral, neural, genetic. The body and the brain are, indeed, strongly interlinked to each other. Therefore, multimodal monitoring of infants and toddlers is the core of our research that aims to combine monitors of brain activity (fNIRS, EEG), physiological changes (heart rate, breathing rate, galvanic skin response), behavior (eye-tracking, video recordings, motion tracking), and genetics.

Alongside the study of typical development, the ToddlerLab with its naturalistic laboratories gives us the opportunity to also identify atypical developmental trajectories. We can assess if a child’s developmental pattern diverges from the typical developmental curve, understand at which level this occurs and why certain milestones are not reached.