Replication Research Symposium

Infant research is particularly prone to problems of generalizability, and replications have not been part of standard practice. The Manybabies consortium has been established to run high-powered multi-lab studies, thereby increasing the robustness of infant research findings. The Manybabies model proposes a radically collaborative, large-scale and open approach to research grounded in theory-building, committed to diversification, and focused on understanding sources of variation. The Manybabies 3 study, in particular, focuses on a replication of a seminal study by Marcus, Vijayan, Rao, and Vishton (1999) reported that seven-month-old infants learned abstract rules over syllable sequences and could generalize those rules to novel syllable sequences. This talk is about the measures taken to make the Manybabies 3 study as robust as possible concerning design, procedures, analytical approaches, and ensuring diversity in contributions. The Manybabies model has recently been ported to a large-scale collaboration for comparative cognition research.