The Cognitive Development Labs presented three posters at the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD 2015) in Philadelphia. The conference was held from March 19th – 21st in the Pennsylvania Convention Center. Former lab coordinator Jessica Taggart (below) presented work done with Jillian Roberts ’15, current lab coordinator Lonnie Bass, and Hilary Barth entitled “Minimal group membership and children’s ideas of equality.” This is Roberts’ senior thesis project.
Andrew Ribner ’14 presented “Preschool indicators of primary school math ability” with Anna Shusterman and former postdoc Emily Slusser. And Hilary Barth presented “A non-Bayesian explanation of adults’ and children’s biased spatial estimates” with Ellen Lesser ’15, Jessica Taggart, Emily Slusser, Lonnie Bass, Sheri Reichelson ’16, and Anna Schwab ’16.
Over a dozen presentations at the conference were authored by up-and-coming scientists who did undergraduate work in the Wesleyan Cognitive Development Labs, too! Here’s a sample of the work these alums (in bold) are doing now:
“Learning about mental states through analogical comparison”
Christian Hoyos ’11 (Northwestern U), Dedre Gentner (Northwestern U)
“The Development of Implicit Theories of Effort”
Julia Leonard ’11 (MIT), Samantha Floyd (MIT), Laura Schulz (MIT)
“Number Word Mappings in Bilingual Children: Evidence for Effects of Language Dominance on Estimation”
Shirlene Wade (University of Rochester), Jessica Sullivan ’08 (Skidmore College), David Barner (UCSD)
“Preschoolers Spontaneously Encode Discourse Structure”
Jessica Sullivan ’08 (Skidmore College), Nestor Tulagan, Nicholas Gruberg, David Barner (UCSD), Victor Ferreira (UCSD)
“Number counts for infants”
Elizabeth Brannon, Ariel Starr ’07 (Duke U)
“The role of non-numerical stimulus features in the development of the number sense”
Ariel Starr ’07, Nick DeWind ’06, Elizabeth Brannon (Duke U)
“Putting the pieces together: Parent spatial language scaffolding for boys and girls during puzzle play”
Raedy Ping (Loyola U), Joanna Schiffman ’11 (Boston College), Naveen Khetarpal (U Chicago), Susan Levine (U Chicago)
“More than meets the eye: The development of children’s cross-sectioning ability”
Christopher Young (U Chicago), Alana Dulaney (U Chicago), Joanna Schiffman ’11 (Boston College), Susan Levine (U Chicago)
“Socioeconomic status may drive divergent reading skill-coherence relationships in right visuospatial tracts”
Margaret Gullick ’07 (UT Austin), Ozlem Demir (Northwestern U), James Booth (UT Austin)
“Exploring exploration: The relation between infants’ exploratory play and developmental outcomes”
Paul Muentener (Tufts U), Elise Herrig ’10, Laura Schulz (MIT)
“The early development of efficiency in real-time lexical processing by children learning American Sign Language”
Kyle MacDonald ’10 (Stanford U), Todd LaMarr (UC Davis), Virginia Marchman (Stanford), David Corina (UC Davis), Anne Fernald (Stanford)
“The development of children’s real-time American Sign Language sentence processing”
Todd LaMarr (UC Davis), Kyle MacDonald ’10 (Stanford U), Virginia Marchman (Stanford), David Corina (UC Davis), Anne Fernald (Stanford)
“Adaptation of language assessment instruments for 2-year-old Wolof-learning children living in rural African villages”
Ann Weber (Stanford U), Virginia Marchman (Stanford), Kyle MacDonald ’10 (Stanford U), Ricardo Bion (Stanford), Yatma Diop (Dalberg Global Development Advisors), Ibrahima Giroux (Tostan), Anne Fernald (Stanford U)
“Social cues modulate the strength of encoding alternative referents in cross-situational word learning”
Kyle MacDonald ’10 (Stanford U), Daniel Yorovsky (Stanford), Michael Frank (Stanford)
“Number Word Learning: A Parent-Driven Training Study”
Dominic Gibson ’10 (U Chicago), Elizabeth Gunderson (Temple U), Susan Levine (U Chicago)
“Numerical approximation in preschool using number gestures and number words”
Elizabeth Gunderson (Temple U), Elizabet Spaepen (U Chicago), Dominic Gibson ’10 (U Chicago), Susan Goldin-Meadow (U Chicago) Susan Levine (U Chicago)
“Socioeconomic Disparities and Contributions of the Home Environment to Infant and Toddler Language Development”
Kimberly G Noble, Natalie Hiromi Brito, Samantha Melvin ’13 (Columbia U), Laura Engelhardt, William P Fifer, Amy J Elliott
“Parent Stress as a Mediator of the SES Language Gap”
Samantha Melvin ’13 (Columbia U), Jessica Calihan, Natalie Brito, Kimberly Noble
“Getting Ready for School: Assessing the feasibility and fidelity of an integrated school readiness intervention”
Helena Duch, Saskia Op den Bosch, Samantha Melvin ’13 (Columbia), Cassie Landers, Kimberly Noble
Former Shusterman lab coordinator Talia Berkowitz and former postdoc Mariah Schug also presented work at the conference:
“Bedtime Learning Together: Exploring the use of technology to support children’s math learning and attitudes”
Talia Berkowitz (U Chicago), Marjorie Schaffer (U Chicago), Sian Beilock (U Chicago), Susan Levine (U Chicago)
“Wayfinding Anxiety and Childhood Experience”
Mariah Schug (Widener U), Jeanine Stefanucci (U of Utah), Sarah Creem-Regehr (U of Utah), Elizabeth Cashdan (U of Utah)
**UPDATE: On March 23rd, the Wesleyan Connection (Wesleyan University’s online newsletter) published a blog post about the Cognitive Development Labs’ presence at SRCD 2015. You can read the blog post here.