It's the first product of Tornek's new business, The Baby School Company. Babies are naturally attracted to television because it offers sound, light, and motion. Music, which features patterns similar to human speech, has been proven to enhance babies' language-processing development. Infants are a tough group to survey, Tornek admits. So researchers rely on cues like heart-rate to measure their interest.
Babies tend to pay more attention to things that vary slightly from what they already know.
So her video begins with simple shapes, like circles and squares, and gradually transforms them into more complex images, like a face or a butterfly. To limit the time parents spend with their infants in front of the TV, the half-hour video is divided into shorter segments. Tornek, who is completing her doctorate in clinical psychology at the University of Miami, plans to use her research on infants and the cognitive and emotional effects of under-stimulating environments to create additional developmental videos, books, and toys.