Infancy researchers have often drawn rich conclusions about early capacities to understand abstract concepts like "causality" or "prosociality" from infants' responses to highly simplified and artificial stimuli, leading to questions about the validity of studies utilizing these methods. Indeed, do these stimuli effectively illustrate abstract concepts to infant participants? And if they do, why not assess infants’ cognitive capacities using ecologically valid stimuli of the sort that infants encounter in their everyday lives? Here, using examples from infant cognitive and social developmental research, we make explicit the underlying logic of using simplified stimuli in studies with infant populations by discussing the tradeoff infancy researchers are forced to make between measurement validity and ecological validity. Though we agree that concerns about the validity of simplified stimuli that emerge from this trade-off are founded, we argue that results from these studies should not be dismissed purely on ecological grounds. Rather, we present guidelines for productively challenging the validity of infant research in ways that further our understanding of infant cognition.
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