Research on Infants' and Children's Cognitive Development
Applications for Spring 2025 are closed for this project.
The Berkeley Early Learning Lab, under the direction of Professor Fei Xu, researches statistical inference, Bayesian reasoning, conceptual representation, belief revision, social cognition, and language acquisition in infants and children aged 4 months to 10 years. Children participate in our studies at our Berkeley Way West lab, at preschools, and at local children’s museums. Our lab conducts studies using a variety of exciting developmental and psychological methods, including violation of expectation, behavioral measures, verbal tasks, choice paradigms, iPad games and eye tracking. 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. After 1-2 semesters of exceptional work in our lab, passionate research assistants may be offered the opportunity to work closely with a post-doctoral researcher or graduate student on a particular research project. These opportunities may involve assisting researchers with data collection and analysis, or collaborating with researchers on designing and implementing new research projects.
Typical tasks of first-semester research assistants in our lab are:
-Greeting and escorting parents and child participants to our lab
-Scheduling participants
-Preparing and processing consent documents
-Stimuli production
-Maintaining stimuli/toys and lab testing spaces
-Assisting with infant participant recruitment
-Assisting with administrative work
-Off-site participant recruitment
-Assisting with eye tracking calibration
-Assisting the experimental sessions
-Behavioral and statistical coding
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: Anna Cao, 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