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A night at the museum

9/9/2015

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What do wire monkeys, a baby with no features and lots of yellow t-shirts have in common? They were all at the science museum ‘lates’ event on the 26th August. 

Once a month the science museum doors are opened in an evening to an over 18 audience, where 3-4,000 people regularly attend. The theme on the 26th August was childhood and the pPOD team were invited to talk about the importance of early parent-infant relationships and attachment. 
There was an exciting buzz in the office a few days ahead of the event where the team unleashed their creative side making props for our drop-in stall. We covered some of the early attachment studies, including:
  • Replicating the monkeys used in Harlow’s 1950s experiments.
  • Goren and colleague's 1975 study, which found that newborn babies start to develop a preference for looking at human faces over other objects or shapes in the first few hours after birth. This pioneering study highlighted the significance of faces in forming early relationships. This research tracked babies eye movements and has been replicated since.
Picture
Our replica of Harlow's monkeys
  • A pin-the-tail-on-the donkey style poster interaction, where members of the public were asked to choose the features on a baby's face which they thought babies use to help form attachments (it’s all of them – the eyes, ears, nose and mouth).
Picture
Images from Goren and colleague's 1975 research
PictureThe pPOD team
Demonstrating and talking about key aspects of developmental psychology to such a broad and diverse audience initially seemed like quite a challenge but the team took this on (Rachael Ryan, Dot King, Ellen Grimås, Jane Iles, Paul Ramchandani, Lorraine Als, Fatima Valencia Agudo and Charlotte Phillips). This was a really exciting and interesting opportunity to talk to the hundreds of people that visited our stall. We enjoyed answering different questions and talking to people from a range of backgrounds about the science underlying our work and sharing some of the current pieces of research we are running in the pPOD group; the Healthy Start, Happy Start and ACORN trials. 

There was a fantastic atmosphere across all of the events at the science museum, including Paul Ramchandani’s talk on ‘First love: do early parent-infant interactions shape our future?’ where we saw the importance of how caregivers notice, respond and anticipate cues from their infants and how this influences parent-infant attachments.  

This was an amazing opportunity to be involved with such an event at the science museum and we particularly liked how the evening was set up with a huge variety of talks, stalls, workshops and activities, linked by the central theme of childhood and displayed throughout the museum – including being taken back to our own childhood with the giant games in the flight room. We look forward to exploring other lates events.

Authors: Rachael Ryan and Dot King
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