Author: julianarivera

As I’m wrapping up my internship at the Spelke Lab, I’ve been reflecting on my time here and trying to visualize myself as a psychology graduate student. Originally, I was hoping to use this experience to see if graduate school would be a good fit upon graduation. After being able to interact with the current students at the Spelke Lab and hearing about their journeys, I’ve been able to gain a very insightful view of what it’s like to do research. I’ve decided that after taking some time off school, I’d want to pursue graduate studies in the developmental neuropsychology realm to continue to do research that supports children in their homes and education.

As mentioned, in my first blog, I was looking forward to data analysis to have a better understanding of our results. Unfortunately, the specific project I’ve been working on has not yet completed data collection. However, I was able to get a rough idea of the results by making graphs along with my mentor of the preliminary data for my poster! My poster describes the project I’ve been working on and so far we have been getting surprising results that are different from previous literature. I was excited to put my work into writing and describe the purpose behind our project during our poster session. I also saw my colleagues present on their very different yet interesting projects related to children’s perception and language.

I was also looking forward to presenting a psychology article for our weekly book club meetings. A peer and I focused on articles that had to do with how emotions may affect our memory of prominent events. We chose this topic to step away from developmental psychology for a bit and read about a different aspect of psychology. These book clubs have definitely helped me become more comfortable by learning how to read valuable results from academic literature which was one of my goals coming into this internship.

While working in academic research, I’ve discovered just how flexible you have to be as an experimenter. Especially, when it comes to scheduling participants and seeing how to fill in the gaps in your data. I’ve also been surprised to see how much collaboration there was in the lab. My specific project was collaborating with a neighboring lab as another principle investigator had already done extensive research on the topic previously. My advice to future research assistants at the Spelke Lab is simply to have fun! You get to work with brilliant students who have a deep passion for developmental psychology and you get to learn so much from them. The entire lab consisted of some of the kindest people as they are willing to share their experiences in research and teach you some valuable skills. I’ll definitely be remembering my time as a research assistant in the Spelke Lab while doing research of my own.

 

During my time at the Spelke Lab, I’ve seen the concepts learned from my Brandeis classes in a research setting. As an intern in a psychology lab, it’s been eye-opening to see the inner workings and realities of conducting research. As mentioned in my first blog, I’m working closely with a graduate student who works with children who have different levels of recognizing number words. We mostly work with preschoolers, and although we’ve had a variety of participants who have different levels of subset and cardinal principle knowers, we have had some difficulties recruiting children from a narrow and specific age range. Therefore, my mentor and I have been working to problem solve this gap in the data results. We are looking to recruit more children and follow up with families as there is no exact age for when children transition from being subset knowers to cardinal principle knowers. Additionally, a large majority of the families signed up for study recruitments come from a high socioeconomic background, which could explain why these children seem to be cardinal principle knowers at an early age. This summer internship has definitely given me a different perspective on how to work through these difficulties by consulting with others and exploring other methods of recruiting participants for studies. 

In my psychology classes at Brandeis, we often discussed research papers, however, it often seemed like we skimmed through the methods section and focused more on the results and conclusions. However, now that I’m working more on the early development of research, I’ve seen firsthand the process that goes behind recruiting participants, consent forms and actually running the studies. It’s definitely been eye-opening as I get to see a different view of research and the work and time that goes into it. 

Through my experience in the Harvard Developmental Psychology Labs, I have been able to build skills that will useful for me in the near future. Through book clubs, I have gotten used to reading published articles and am able to have meaningful conversations about the results and data that was found from previous studies. These weekly meetings have helped me to get comfortable with dissecting and understanding these articles that I will most likely encounter during my upper-level courses at Brandeis and graduate school. In addition, by learning more about the early development of these projects I feel much more prepared and equipped to begin thinking about how I will conduct my own projects when I pursue graduate studies. 

This past month I have been working at the Spelke Lab at Harvard’s Developmental Psychology Department as a research assistant. The Spelke Lab focuses on infants and children and their experiences with hidden objects, words, numbers, and social relationships. As part of the Spelke Lab team, I’ve been able to see firsthand the methodology behind psychology research. The specific project I’m working on with a graduate student is how children explore numerical concepts as preschoolers. This project builds on concepts explained in previous literature from Susan Carey on how young children can be categorized into subset knowers and cardinal principle knowers (CP-knowers). Subset knowers understand the numerical value of small numbers such as “one”, “two”, “three”, and “four”. Children then become CP-knowers around the age of 3 ½ where they understand the concept of counting and can count larger sets. This specific project focused on the number five as it becomes a difficult numerical concept for children under 3 ½ years. This research is crucial in understanding how children come to understand numbers, whether through verbal counting, using their fingers, or a mental map and in understanding at what age do children transition from subset knowers to CP-knowers. 

As a research assistant, I’ve been responsible for mainly communicating with parents when it comes to recruiting participants for the studies, scheduling, and ensuring consent forms are sent and completed. Since the project is still in its data collection stages, I’ve been able to observe these studies where children play a game to identify how they engage with numbers and what their knower level is. Hopefully, I’ll be able to run the studies on my own soon and interact with the participants more. Since we may be doing data analysis soon, I’ve also been getting trained on softwares such as Detavyu and RStudio. The lab team has also been meeting up for book clubs and lab lunches weekly. It’s been great to hear from other graduate students and the research they’re doing regarding how children perceive social relationships and vocabulary. This past week we even had a very interesting conversation during book club on language and how previous research explored word gaps between children in different socioeconomic backgrounds. 

As a rising senior, I wanted to explore potentially going into graduate school for psychology research. So far, my experience at the Spelke Lab has allowed me to work directly with researchers and helped me get comfortable with reading published articles. This summer I’m looking forward to beginning data analysis and seeing how the results of these studies compare to the previous literature. I’m also looking forward to leading my own book club discussion, hopefully exploring literature on the neurological side of development and neuroplasticity. All the research assistants will also be creating a poster on their specific projects. I’m excited to work on my poster that I’ll be presenting towards the end of the summer and also seeing the results of other projects from the lab.