Remote Infant Studies of Early Learning (RISE): Scalable Online Replications of Key Findings in Infant Cognitive Development

The current article describes the Remote Infant Studies of Early Learning, a battery intended to provide robust looking time measures of cognitive development that can be administered remotely to inform our understanding of individual developmental trajectories in typical and atypical populations, particularly infant siblings of autistic children. This battery was developed to inform our understanding of early cognitive and language development in infants who will later receive a diagnosis of autism. Using tasks that have been successfully implemented in lab-based paradigms, we included assessments of attention, memory, prediction, word recognition, numeracy, multimodal processing, and social evaluation. This study reports results on the feasibility and validity of administration of this task battery in 55 infants who were recruited from the general population at age 6 months (n = 29; 14 female, 15 male) or 12 months (n = 26; 14 female, 12 male; 62% White, 13% Asian, 1% Black, 1% Pacific Islander, 22% more than one race; 6% Hispanic). Infant looking behavior was recorded during at-home administration of the battery on the family’s home computer and automatically coded for attention to stimuli using iCatcher+, an open-access software that assesses infant gaze direction. Results indicate that while some tasks replicated lab-based findings (attention, memory, prediction, and numeracy), others did not (word recognition, multimodal processing, and social evaluation). These findings will inform efforts to refine the battery as we continue to develop a robust set of tasks to improve the understanding of early cognitive development at the individual level in general and clinical populations.