Ongoing Studies
Photo Credit: Verity Pinter
Play
What does it mean to have fun? We have collected video data of children ages 5-10 years playing with toys under different instructions: Do whatever you want, Try to have fun, Learn as much as you can. Next steps are to categorize children’s actions and test specific hypotheses about decision-making and learning. For example, do children at pursue more diverse goals when trying to have fun than when trying to learn? How might learning outcomes differ across conditions? What kinds of developmental change might we observe?
Student Involvement:
10-12h a week. At least 60% effort on annotating and analyzing participant responses, such as categorizing actions and verbal explanations. Also: attend weekly project meetings and(if aligned with course schedule) weekly lab meetings. Depending on skills and interest, student may help to design new stimuli (e.g., videos, ppts) or follow-up experiments (e.g., adult surveys, comparisons to AI systems)
Mentorship Provided to Student:
Students will meet weekly with mentor for at least one hour/week. In addition to project-specific training (how to design and analyze behavioral experiments), we may together: read papers, run statistical analyses in R, design new studies for children or adults, discuss professional development, etc.
How to Apply?
Please fill out this application form: https://forms.gle/MEm5RCJVC6nNZmyf9