The Rainbow Project
The Rainbow Project is investigating how babies see colours. Our previous research has shown that babies know that some colours belong together. For example, at four-months, babies treat different greens as if they are the same kind of colour. The Rainbow Project aims to establish how babies group different colours in this way. Over two years, we hope that around 400 babies will visit the Baby Lab to help us answer this question. We show babies coloured images and look to see if they notice a change in the colour. The project will not only tell us how babies see colour, it will also help us understand how babies structure their visual world and how this structure might help them think and learn. The Rainbow Project is part of a bigger 5 year project (Project Categories) funded by the European Research Council (led by Dr. Franklin).
How do we know?
Even though babies cannot tell us how they see things or what they are thinking, infant researchers have come up with a number of ways of finding this out. One of the main methods is to investigate how babies look at things. If babies look at one thing more than another (‘preferential looking’) then we know that they must be able to tell the difference between these two things. If babies look at something new longer than something they have seen before (‘novelty preference’), then we know that they can tell the difference between the familiar and the new thing. The Sussex Baby Lab uses these well established methods to understand how babies see, think and learn.
We also measure how babies look at different images using a special eye-tracking camera. This camera allows us to record with great precision exactly what a baby fixates when they look at an image (e.g., do they look at the eyes or nose of a face). Here you can see a 4-month old baby taking part in one of our eye-tracking studies. The bulls-eye sticker on the baby’s head helps the camera to keep focus on their eye when they move their head. The other image shows the baby’s eye-movements being recorded by the camera.
What happens to the findings?
We inform the scientific community about the findings of our research by giving presentations at national and international conferences. In addition, we give invited talks to research groups at universities around the world (e.g., Cambridge University; Oxford University; University College London; University of California-Berkeley; University of Stanford).
We then publish our research findings in scientific journals specialising in Child Development or Psychology, and in broad interest journals read by scientists from multiple disciplines. So far, we have published over 25 scientific articles and book chapters. See here for a full list of our publications.
In the past we have worked with industry (e.g., children’s TV or toy companies) to enable the findings of our research have influence in the real world. We also work with various forms of the media to ensure that the general public find out about our findings. For example, our research has been reported to the public via: BBC Horizon TV documentary, 'Do you See What I See?'; National Public Radio (USA); The Naked Scientist, BBC 5 Live Radio; Southern Counties Radio; Radio 6PR Perth (Australia); Beat Radio (Ireland); Mercury Radio; BBC News Online; Nature News; The Times; Junior Baby and Pregnancy Magazine