All In The Mind

Presenter Claudia Hammond starts a new series of All in the Mind by joining mothers and babies at a travelling, high-tech language lab in a Children's Centre in London's East End.The testing session is just one of many to be carried out over the next two years in the communities of two of London's most deprived boroughs, Tower Hamlets and Newham. Parents and babies are being invited to participate in a novel psychological study to investigate whether researchers can pick up very early indicators of later language or attention problems in infants as young as 6 months. The babies will be retested and assessed again when they are two years old.The travelling 'babylab' is a high tech computer screen, set up in local children's centres. The baby sits in front of it and is played various videos and sounds aimed at testing how sensitive he or she is to speech and other aspects of their environments. The computer screen also contains a camera and eye movement tracker, so as well as testing the infants it also records