Jane, whose name has been changed because of her lab’s confidentiality policy, spent all of Fall Quarter, like many pre-med hopefuls, working in a lab. She entered data, assisted graduate students, and other “grunt work” for hours in Annenberg Hall, bored and burned out. But Jane, a Weinberg sophomore, did not synthesize proteins or do anything involved test tubes, the images conjured by “university research.” Jane helped test babies.Evanston-area children, from 10 months to four years old, are found via Craigslist, word of mouth and area hospitals, says Dr. Susan Hespos, director of the Infant Cognition Lab and professor of psychology at NU. After giving birth to a healthy child, mothers at Northwestern Memorial Hospital are given a letter about the study, asking that they hand over their kid in a few months. Once in the lab, Jane’s supervisors performed tests like showing the children different but related toys, such as a mother and a baby penguin, to see if they could extrapolate the relationship. “It’s sort of like conditioning,” Jane says. “So it’s like if you see one thing, can you project it onto another.” The babies usually stay for 30 minutes, and only come once. For their services, the kids get a “toy or T-shirt,” and parents can drop off older ones to be babysat by researchers. Parents can, surprisingly, trust these 20-somethings-Jane and other lab workers have to undergo specific training and checks, Hespos says. An “International Review Board” also has to approve the site yearly for safety.Right now, Hespos’ team is studying pre-linguistic babies and the connections between thought and language. As the child sits on its parent’s lab, a researcher shows him or her a display of images, and records how long the infant looks at them. “We hope to understand about how infants behave and how that changes over time,” Hespos says.However, at the end of last quarter, Jane decided to leave the lab. She says she found her work “boring.” For the most part, she was working with spreadsheets and computer programs. She switched into a cognitive neuroscience lab where she now works. “I much prefer neurology,” she says. Um, aren’t babies supposed to be fun?