Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) Site: Developing Social Minds

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Academic Level:
For most summer research programs, this is your upcoming status as of the fall. Always check with the individual program's website for details.

Undergraduates - Sophomore
Undergraduates - Junior
Undergraduates - Senior

Description:
The Boston College Developmental Psychology program is an NSF Summer Research Experience for Undergraduates. Summer interns will gain hands-on experience in all aspects of socio-cognitive developmental psychology research while also participating in professional development meetings and learning computer programming. This is an excellent program for students who want to learn more about research who may be interested in pursuing graduate school. Successful applicants will work full-time for 10 weeks from June 1 - August 6. Students will be paid $600 per week across 10 weeks to participate.

There are four participating developmental psychology labs. Students will be accepted to primarily work within one of these labs for the duration of the summer:

THE CANINE COGNITION LAB (Dr. Angie Johnston) investigates the evolutionary origins of human social learning by comparing human children and pet dogs. The focus this summer will be on testing pet dogs in Zoom studies examining questions including how dogs recruit help from humans, what dogs understand about human communication, and what behaviors dogs demonstrate when they are surprised.

THE COOPERATION LAB (Dr. Katherine McAuliffe) studies how children acquire a sense of fairness, how they regulate their investment in cooperative endeavors, how the development of cooperation varies across different social and cultural contexts and how an emerging psychology of cooperation in children interfaces with other aspects of conceptual development like perspective taking and group bias.

THE INFANT AND CHILD COGNITION LAB (Dr. Sara Cordes) studies how infants, children, and adults track quantities (time, number, amount), acquire formal mathematical concepts (from verbal counting in preschoolers to algebraic concepts in teenagers), and how learning of these concepts are influenced by social contexts and gender stereotypes.

THE LANGUAGE LEARNING LAB (Dr. Joshua Hartshorne) takes an interdisciplinary approach to studying how children learn language. In addition to traditional developmental research methods, the lab makes use of massive online experiments, in which tens or even hundreds of thousands of children and adults participate in a single experiment, and computational models of language acquisition.

This internship will take place remotely. Students can participate from anywhere in the United States, but please note the program will operate on EST.


 • Note: Funding pending
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This program is funded by:
National Science Foundation (NSF)


Page last updated 7/14/2021
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