I spent 6 years during my PhD conducting looking time studies on babies in the lab, and I spent the last few weeks piloting replications of lab studies over Zoom. In this series of blog posts I will answer the following two questions: Is it possible to do violation of expectation studies (VOE) with babies in their homes over video chat? (Part 1, this post: Yes, and here’s how.) Are the data high-quality? (Part 2, next post: Yes! Let me show you.)

Open any introductory textbook in psychology or neuroscience, and you will find the adage: the mind is what the brain does. But in truth, there are still fundamental disagreements in the scientific community about how to study the mind and brain, and how to know when we’ve understood something about…