Research on Infants' and Children's Cognitive Development
Applications for Fall 2025 are closed for this project.
The Berkeley Early Learning Lab, under the direction of Professor Fei Xu, researches statistical/probabilistic inference, Bayesian reasoning, conceptual representation, belief revision, social cognition, compositionality, and language acquisition in infants and children aged 4 months to 10 years. Children participate in our studies at our lab in Berkeley Way West, at preschools, at local parks and museums, and on online platforms. Becoming a research assistant in the Berkeley Early Learning Lab offers students the opportunity to learn more about child development research and the research process, as well as gain first-hand experience interacting with participants in a highly productive research lab.
Role: Research assistants in the Berkeley Early Learning Lab are essential to our research in that they represent our lab to parents and children and ensure that research activities run as smoothly as possible. Research assistants will work with a postdoctoral researcher, graduate student, or project manager on one or multiple research projects. These opportunities may involve assisting researchers with recruitment, data collection, creating stimuli for experiments, and data coding and processing. Typical tasks of research assistants in our lab may include but are not limited to:
-Recruiting participants
-Scheduling appointments for participants
-Assisting with experimental sessions
-Off-site participant recruitment and data collection at local parks and museums
-Preparing and processing consent documents
-Behavioral coding, infant looking time coding, and statistical coding
-Organizing and processing data to be coded/analyzed
-Attending lab meetings
-Attending meetings with direct mentor
-Stimuli production
-Maintaining stimuli/toys and lab testing spaces
-Assisting with administrative work
Qualifications: Required: Experience working with children and parents; At least 9 hours of availability each week; Weekend availability; Proficiency in English ///
Not required, but desirable: Committing for more than a semester, Programming skills
Day-to-day supervisor for this project: Alyson Wong & Cristina Sarmiento, Staff Researcher
Hours: 9-11 hrs
Off-Campus Research Site: 2121 Berkeley Way Mail Room 3302
Related website: http://babylab.berkeley.edu
Education, Cognition & Psychology