We are pleased to see that the Baby Laughter project is this month’s featured project at the Scientific American Citizen Science page. Citizen science is the blanket term used to refer
crowd sourcing and public involvement in real science projects. Some great examples include the Zooniverse project which has the public classifying astronomical bodies and Foldit, a computer game which gets you solving geniune protein folding problems.
The baby laughter project is a little more low tech than those but hopefully no less scientific. All you need to take part in our project is a baby and the ability to make it laugh. It is easy, fun and more scientific than you might imagine. We think babies are going to be laughing at things that they are just starting to understand. (A dog that goes ‘Miaow’ is only going to be hilarious once you know that dogs are supposed to go ‘woof’.) So with enough detailed observations from enough babies at different ages we can paint a cheerful picture of what they understand at different ages.
So if you’ve made a baby laugh recently we’d like to hear about it. You can either fill in our detailed questionnaire, submit a short field report of your observations or best of all, send us a youtube video of your laughing baby.
If you haven’t made a baby laugh recently, go and find one and get to work (for science!)