Infant test subject: Ellis V.

One of the forms I had signed in the blurry days after Ellis’s birth at NYU was a volunteer form for their Infant Action Lab in the physchology department. Last week they called and asked if we were interested in having Ellis come in to do a crawling obstacle course of sorts. They explained that she would be crawling over a series of bridges of varying widths and they would observe her perception of space and balance. It sounded interesting enough and I was curious to see what else they might say about infant development. The graduate student spotted Ellis the entire time, so I felt very safe that she was never in any danger of falling. Erik and I called to her from the other side and caught her attention with a lot of interesting toys and cheerios. She crawled at lightning speed across the wider bridges and became more and more tentative with the increasingly narrower ones. When they put on a ridicuously narrow two inch bridge, she looked at us like we were crazy and decided to practice standing and cruising instead. Ellis didn’t fuss at all and they said we would be on their call list for more studies in the future. I am curious about their language studies once Ellis begins to really talk.