How much do infants know about the world in which they live? At what age do humans begin to develop an understanding of object permanence and of the reality that people act in response to different things around them? These are the kinds of questions Yuyan Luo, Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychological Sciences, seeks to answer. In addition to teaching cognition development courses—from infancy to toddler—she runs the Infant Cognition Lab, which tests psychological and biological knowledge development through a series of lab experiments. Now in its second year of operation, the lab conducts experiments with participants as young as two and one-half months old.

In a back corner of the University of Missouri’s medical building, a few floors above the hospital and tucked away to the right, Habib Zaghouani watches a cellular war. He has been up there for seven years, with an army of graduate students and a colony of mice, trying to understand why our bodies attack us and how we can make them stop.

Psychologist Yuyan Luo explains how she first became interested in studying infant cognition and the types of “looking-time studies” she uses to study how much infants understand about object permanence.

Luo runs the Infant Cognition Lab at MU, in its second year of existence. Luo describes some of the experiments she began in graduate school concerning transparency and object permanence.

Luo describes her current research project, which focuses on determining infants’ knowledge of psychological reasoning. Using the looking-time method, she is testing infants as young as three-months old to see if they understand the concept of object preference.

Luo furthers her research about infant psychological understanding by conducting similar experiments with non-human agents.

All of the subjects in Luo’s experiments are volunteered by their parents. Luo talks about research she hopes to pursue in her future work.

In addition to running the Infant Cognition Lab, Luo also teaches cognition development courses at MU, ranging from infancy to toddler psychological and biological knowledge development.

Yuyan Luo uses “looking-time studies” to learn how much infants understand about the world around them. In this lab video, the top half of the frame will reveal what the infant is shown, whereas the bottom half reveals the infant's reaction.

Habib Zaghouani, along with his team of graduate and post-doctoral fellows, is working on four different projects in the lab. The first examines why newborn babies are so susceptible to infection, the second tries to understand how the immune system’s memory works, while the third and fourth aim at developing treatments for specific diseases: type I diabetes and multiple sclerosis.

Christine Hoeman is the head of Zaghouani’s project researching infant immune systems, an effort that seeks to understand why a newborn is more likely to have allergic reactions and fevers. The project will hopefully result in better vaccines for babies.