fNIRS Relational Reasoning on Children Ages 6-12
Silvia Bunge, Professor
Psychology
Applications for Spring 2025 are closed for this project.
The Building Blocks of Cognition Laboratory, led by Prof. Silvia Bunge, is investigating how we can help children learn to read, interpret, and reason with graphs more effectively, leveraging insights from cognitive psychology. This project involves behavioral methods. You can learn more about the lab's main lines of research here: http://bungelab.berkeley.edu/projects-2/
Lab culture: Our lab offers a welcoming space where motivated students can thrive and grow their love for science. The work of many of our undergrad lab alumni has culminated in conference presentations, senior theses, and some have even co-authored journal publications. Our small team is full of creative, talented, and passionate individuals. We are seeking to welcome a fantastic student to this team starting Spring 2025.
Role: Responsibilities: The student will assist in recruiting and collecting data from participants ages 6-12 for a functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) relational reasoning task. The student will also have the opportunity to learn how to preparing fNIRS data for analysis, data cleaning, and how to use the analysis pipeline.
The student may also be responsible for reading and summarizing research papers. The student will work directly with graduate students, full time researchers, as well as with Professor Bunge. The student is strongly encouraged to attend biweekly lab meetings, but this is not required.
Qualifications: We are looking for students who are majoring (or intend to major) in psychology or cognitive science and have an interest in STEM education. Sophomores and juniors preferred. Students should be organized, detail-oriented, and highly motivated to see the project through. No prior research experience is required. Some experience with R and/or python programming in general is desirable. Experience reading and summarizing articles is also desirable.
In your application, please provide brief answers to the following questions:
1. What is your major and class level?
2. How many hours a week could you realistically devote to the project?
3. Do you have experience working with children? Explain.
4. Why are you interested in working on this specific project and/or in our lab?
5. What do you seek to gain out of this experience?
6. What type of relevant skills do you already have?
7. Anything else you would like us to know about you?
Day-to-day supervisor for this project: Patrick Kelly , Graduate Student
Hours: 6-8 hrs
Related website: http://bungelab.berkeley.edu
Education, Cognition & Psychology