Welcome to The Infant and Child Research Lab

Welcome to the Infant and Child Research Laboratory in the School of Psychology at Trinity College Dublin, directed by Dr Jean Quigley & Dr Elizabeth Nixon. 

In the lab we study the way parents and children interact and how this is important for children’s development. We are interested in finding out which aspects of parent-child interaction are most important for child development and to explore this we observe, record, and study how children and their parents react and respond to each other during play. We study how children and parents shape each other’s behaviour as they interact and at the moment we are particularly interested in exploring this with fathers and their children. This type of research assumes that the way we routinely interact with our infants and young children influences not only their behaviour and responses in the short term, but importantly influences many aspects of their later development.