Psychology students recently experienced had their first trial as “parents” this year as students had the opportunity to take care of robotic babies for a few days in order to understand how babies think differently than people and how human reflexes and the mind develop from infancy.

This project replaced a test at the end of their developmental psychology study. Students had the babies for three days and two nights. The robotic babies were programmed to cry every two to three hours for twenty minutes, and students had to feed them, burp them and have their diapers changed in order to stop the crying.

“I lost a lot of sleep,” says junior Psychology student Kayhon Rabbani, “I was practically a zombie. It was terrible.”

Psychology students were required to have the baby at all times, support its neck and soothe it when it cried. At the end of their time with the baby they were to write an essay reflection paper on the how they felt when taking care of the baby, how the project displayed how babies developed, and how the public reacted to the baby, as well as include five pictures with the baby, three of those pictures being in public.

“When I took the baby in public people tended to look at me funny,” says Rabbani, “sometimes people would come up to me and look at the baby before realizing it was plastic, and then they would just walk away.”