Frequently Asked Questions
Frequently Asked Questions
You can sign up by filling out the Participate form on our website, or when you contact us via telephone or email to volunteer for our research, our colleague will ask you to provide some data for our database (the infant’s name, sex, date of birth, and your contact information). When your child reaches the appropriate age range for one of our studies, we will get in touch with you and inform you about the study. If you decide to participate, we will find a convenient date for your visit to the Babylab.
Our research centers are located in two wonderful cities: Budapest and Vienna. ||||| In BUDAPEST you can find us at Október 6 street, close to the Bazilika, which can be easily reached by public transport. If you wish to drive to our center, we provide free parking in Libertz Square Garage. ||||| In VIENNA we are located in Quellenstrasse 51 in 1100 Vienna, which can be easily reached by public transport. If you wish to drive to our center, we provide free parking in the building.
Our family-friendly lab is easy to access with a stroller. Children of any age can find toys to play with in our comfy reception area. We also have a changing room and a highchair for everyone to use.
Our studies usually last 5-10 minutes, but the whole visit takes about half-an-hour as we always make sure to have enough time for your baby to get familiar with the new people and environment, and we also provide facilities for feeding and changing your baby before or after the study.
Yes, during these studies children sit in their parents’ lap or next to them. We usually ask the parents to be as passive as possible in these few minutes. If more people accompany a child, it might happen that not all of them can be present during the study, but all of them can watch the video of the session.
Yes, certainly! While you are participating in the study with your baby, our colleague will look after your older child(ren).
Many babies participate in our studies involving screens without previous experience, that’s not an issue. If a parent doesn’t want their child to watch a screen even for a short time (just a few minutes), they can let us know when they sign up or anytime we contact them about a study, in this case we will only invite them to interactive studies.
We are trying to make our studies enjoyable for as many children as possible, but sometimes children might get scared or bored. If they communicate that they feel uncomfortable or the parent asks us to stop, we quit the session.
When we measure things that cannot be directly observed (e.g. what babies expect to happen in a given situation, what conclusions they draw or what they remember), we can only get reliable results based on multiple measurements. We usually can’t carry out many measurements with small children as they soon get bored or tired of a study, so we collect a few data points each from many children instead. These data points only lead to reliable conclusions if analysed together, in a proficient manner, and only on the age group level.
We perform a large set of studies that can involve different methodologies, depending on the age of the child and the main research question. Some studies take the form of a simple game: the child plays with the experimenter while performing an engaging task such as finding a hidden object. In other studies, babies watch images or short videos, and we record how they react to the action shown on the screen, what they look at, and for how long. We also have studies during which we measure the activity of the brain while showing a scene to analyze the relationship between cerebral/neural and mental development. Prior to the studies you will be given detailed information about the research that your child will be participating in, and during the studies you will be with your baby at all times.
The studies are done by young post-doctoral researchers, PhD students and trained research assistants.
The goal of our studies is to understand the general characteristics of babies‘ mental development at various ages. Therefore we look at the infants‘ behavior as a group, rather than measuring individual differences. There are no „good“ or „bad“ answers in our studies. When a study has been completed, we will report our findings to the parents of all participants.
We put together a summary each year about the progress of our ongoing research projects and what we learned from them, this is available on our website. Some research projects go on for years, so we can’t always share final results in the first issue after participation. If a study gets published, we share these news on our website and our Facebook page.
||||| BUDAPEST: The Hungarian law LXVI., passed in 1992, permits the Central Office for Administrative and Electronic Public Services to provide data from the state population registry for research purposes upon application. Our research has undergone a detailed review by this office and has been approved, giving us the right to periodically request the addresses of certain babies born in Budapest, including your child. This address is only used for addressing our letter and is not stored afterwards. ||||| VIENNA: The name and address of your child were provided to us, by the City Administration of Vienna from the local register of residents. We need this data to inform you about our research. The legal basis of the data handling is article 6 paragraph 1 lit. e of the General Data Protection Regulation in conjunction with § 8 paragraph 2 Z. lit. a of the Austrian Data Protection Act, BGBl I 1999/165 in the version of BGBl I 2019/14, according to which the transfer of address data of persons is permitted for informative purposes if there is a public interest to inform the concerned persons. Since the conduct of psychological studies is for the public benefit, we were given permission to request the address of your child and use it for the purpose of informing you. The legal admissibility of the data handling as outlined above has been confirmed by the data protection authority per decision issued on 8th of July 2021, D202.276/2021-0.166.484. The address data of your child is used only for sending this letter and will be deleted immediately, at least within a month. Therefore, no data of you or your child will be retained. Also, we apply appropriate measures to ensure that we will not obtain the data of your child twice. The Österreichische Post AG supports the logistic handling for the shipping by addressing the letters and is bound to confidentiality by means of a data processing agreement in line with article 28 of the General Data Protection Regulation.
We keep the data of our participants in our database until they become 10 years old, but we delete them any time upon request. Data is stored on password protected computers and can be accessed only by authorized personnel. We ensure that our procedures regarding data handling comply with the GDPR protocols.
You have the right to access your and your child's data. In case the data concerning you or your child is incorrect or incomplete, you can request the correction or the completion of such data. You also have the right to demand the erasure of data if processed unlawfully. Moreover, you have the right to receive data which you have provided to us in a structured form (right to data portability). If you gave us your consent to process data, you have the right to withdraw your consent to the processing of data at any given time. Finally, you also have the right to issue a complaint to the Austrian data protection authority, Barichgasse 40-42, A-1030 Vienna or to the Hungarian data protection authority, ugyfelszolgalat@naih.hu, 1363 Budapest, Pf. 9.
Only part of the CEU Babylab moved to Vienna, our Budapest facility still operates and we hope to keep it running for a long time. The people working at the Vienna and Budapest sites are members of the same research group.
Participate in our Studies
By signing up to participate you agree to be contacted about research opportunities, but there’s no obligation to actually participate. We ask for the parents’ consent for each study separately and they may withdraw that at any point.
We only use this data to get in touch with the families in relation to research and we don’t share it with any third party. We store the applicants’ personal information no longer than the child’s tenth birthday, but we delete it upon request at any point.
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