Goal-setting in the real world
Anne Collins, Professor
Psychology
Closed. This professor is continuing with Fall 2024 apprentices on this project; no new apprentices needed for Spring 2025.
From founding a startup to climbing the tallest peaks, people set a wide range of objectives for themselves. How do people decide which goals to set? How do they manage progress towards different – and perhaps competing – objectives?
The proposed research plans to investigate goal setting in a range of naturalistic settings. We will combine computational models of human cognition with large datasets to uncover key mechanisms underlying people’s decisions to pursue different goals. This research project is going to focus heavily on data collection from online sources, including open datasets and websites. The students will work with the mentor to collect, analyze, and present the data, and use it to produce mathematical models of decision-making.
Role: Apprentices will explore relevant literature on human cognition, collect and organize freely available data, and test relevant hypotheses using statistical methods. Students will be expected to participate in the more general lab experience, with regular group or lab meetings with other lab members and the PI.
Qualifications: Applicants must have a quantitative background, including statistics, mathematics, computer science and/or data science, as well as an interest in neuroscience or cognitive science. Experience with the following is a plus: advanced data visualization, web scraping, and dealing with large public datasets. We also have a preference for students who expect to volunteer in the lab for more than a single academic year. Students must be organized, reliable, extremely self-driven, independent, and ready to take on new challenges.
Day-to-day supervisor for this project: Gaia Molinaro, Graduate Student
Hours: 9-11 hrs
Related website: https://ccn.berkeley.edu/
Social Sciences Education, Cognition & Psychology