Ten-month-old Max Lyon is presented some toys to test his attention and behavior during research at the Infant and Early Cognition Program at the University of Kansas Edwards Campus in Overland Park. The program studies early cognitive development of infants and young children.

OVERLAND PARK — Ten-month-old Max Lyon smiled when a Sesame Street character appeared on a TV screen. He got startled when a jack popped out of a jack-in-the-box. He threw a toy penguin on the ground. He looked at a book. He burped.

This might seem like a normal day in the life of a baby, but for Kansas University researchers it could hold the key to understanding childhood language development.

At the KU Baby Lab at the university’s Edwards Campus, researchers are studying how early attention skills in social settings impact language development later in life. The results of the five-year study could eventually reveal early warning signs of autism.

“For professionals who are trying to to identify developmental delays, it can be really challenging because there is so much difference in when children start using words,” said Brenda Salley, an assistant research professor at KU and licensed clinical psychologist. “So we’re hoping that with some of the things we learn from the study, we’ll be able to identify some of those red flags.”

KU has long been at the cutting-edge of research into early cognitive development. Former professor Frances Horowitz began opening the so-called baby labs in the 1970s. There are now three: the one in Overland Park, which mostly studies children who are developing normally; one in Lawrence that researches kids with autism; and one at KU Medical Center, which looks at the effects of early nutrition on cognitive development. This kind of work has only grown more important as diagnoses of autism spectrum disorder have continued to rise.

“This has been a longstanding historical strength for the university, and we’re carrying on that tradition,” said John Colombo, the director of KU’s Schiefelbusch Institute for Life Span Studies, who helped found the Overland Park lab with Horowitz in the mid-1980s. He added that game-changing discoveries in early childhood development often start with the type of basic research the Edwards Campus baby lab is doing.

The current study there is trying to gauge how infants pay attention in social situations.

“We think that a child who may be more sophisticated in their attention to people may acquire language quicker than other children, in part because they may have more language-learning opportunities but also because something about that social information is particularly impactful for language development,” Salley said.

The first phase of the study is for two years and about halfway finished. The second phase will be a three-year longitudinal study of children with signs of developmental delays. The research could ultimately lead to advancements in the way all infants are taught language.

The KU Baby Lab looks more like a day-care center than a laboratory, with its baskets of toys and walls covered with pictures of cartoon animals.

On a recent day there, Salley put a heart-rate monitor on Max, a charmer-in-training with straight blondish-brown hair and a cheeky smile, before putting him into a car seat facing a TV monitor. As different objects and people flashed on the screen, Salley watched the infant’s reactions from a computer monitor in an adjoining room. She was measuring his distractibility, how he processed information and how he shifted his attention from one thing to another.

He then sat on his mothers’s lap as Salley played with toys in front of him. She watched how he responded to, say, a jack-in-the-box or Thomas the Tank Engine. This showed how he communicates without words. Then, Max was put in a high chair, and he and his mom played with toys together so Salley could monitor how he acted around someone he was more familiar with.

“Max is doing some pretty sophisticated things before he can talk. He’s paying attention to people and other things that are happening,” Salley told his mother, Tricia Huntsman, 28, of Blue Springs, Mo. “When he doesn’t have words, he lets you know what he wants and what he needs with gestures and sounds and eye contact.”

When the session was over, Huntsman filled out a questionnaire on her son’s language development thus far, and Salley told her she would be getting another survey in a few months to find out how Max is progressing. While Huntsman completed the forms, Salley sat on the floor, playing with Max.

After he and his said mom goodbye, Salley said: “This is definitely the most fun part of the job.”