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Project Descriptions
Spring 2025

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Showing 44 projects out of 44 found. On page 1 out of 1.
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Biased priors or inference in depressed and anxious individuals?

Sonia Bishop - Professor, Psychology

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: On Campus

General to all projects listed: Computational models have been a powerful tool for studying decision-making in both psychology and neuroscience. They have recently become popular in psychiatry as well. Part of the appeal has been that computational approaches delineate individual differences in decision-making that can explain why people...

 Education, Cognition & Psychology   Social Sciences

Computational investigation of influences of anxiety and depression on human decision making under uncertainty.

Sonia Bishop - Professor, Psychology

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: On Campus

Computational models have been a powerful tool for studying decision-making in both psychology and neuroscience. They have recently become popular in psychiatry as well. Part of the appeal has been that computational approaches delineate individual differences in decision-making that can explain why people with different psychiatric disorders (such...

 Education, Cognition & Psychology   Social Sciences

Effort based decision-making

Sonia Bishop - Professor, Psychology

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: On Campus

General to all projects: Computational models have been a powerful tool for studying decision-making in both psychology and neuroscience. They have recently become popular in psychiatry as well. Part of the appeal has been that computational approaches delineate individual differences in decision-making that can explain why people with...

 Education, Cognition & Psychology   Social Sciences

Exploring the brain's response to faces using maps of the cortical surface

Sonia Bishop - Professor, Psychology

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     

In this project, we are using multi-feature encoding models to analyse functional magnetic resonance imaging data collected when participants look at naturalistic examples of emotional faces. The goal is to better understand how tuning to facial information (expression, gender, age etc) varies across the cortical surface of the human...

 Education, Cognition & Psychology   Social Sciences

fNIRS Relational Reasoning on Children Ages 6-12

Silvia Bunge - Professor, Psychology

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

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...

 Education, Cognition & Psychology

The neural correlates of efficient rule exploration in human decision-making under uncertainty

Anne Collins - Professor, Psychology

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: On Campus

Over the course of millions of years, the human brain has been intricately shaped by the process of evolution, transforming it into an unparalleled learning system capable of adeptly navigating complex and ever-changing natural environments. While its remarkable learning abilities surpass those of cutting-edge machine learning algorithms, the...

 Social Sciences   Education, Cognition & Psychology

Studying habit learning using a computerized decision making task

Anne Collins - Professor, Psychology

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

Habits are inflexible patterns of behavior that have become deeply ingrained through repetition. When it comes to situations we are likely to encounter often, habitual control can be effective and efficient. When passing by the Campanile en route to class, you might turn left automatically, and eventually arrive at your...

 Social Sciences   Education, Cognition & Psychology

Goal-setting in the real world

Anne Collins - Professor, Psychology

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: On Campus

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...

 Social Sciences   Education, Cognition & Psychology

Computational Modeling of Learning in Complex Environments

Anne Collins - Professor, Psychology

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours     Location: On Campus

Navigating complex natural environments presents a robust challenge to even the most advanced artificial systems, yet humans can often handle these same challenges effortlessly. What algorithms underly these human capabilities to learn and generalize so efficiently? My research investigates the learning algorithms implemented by the human brain to efficiently act...

 Social Sciences   Education, Cognition & Psychology

Social Psychology Research Assistant in the UC DREAMS (Understanding Culture and Development to Re-Imagine an Equitable And More just Society) Lab

Arianne Eason - Professor, Psychology

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: On Campus

In the UC DREAMS Lab, directed by Professor Eason, we research how our social and cultural contexts shape attitudes and behavior, and reinforce inequality. Our social, cultural, and developmental psychology lab is hiring research assistants to help with several projects this semester. Across projects, we investigate prejudice, attitudes, stereotyping, discrimination...

 Education, Cognition & Psychology   Social Sciences

Developmental Psychology Research Assistant in the UC DREAMS (Understanding Culture and Development to Re-Imagine an Equitable And More just Society)Lab

Arianne Eason - Professor, Psychology

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: Off Campus

In the UC DREAMS Lab, directed by Professor Eason, we research how our social and cultural contexts shape attitudes and behavior, and reinforce inequality. Our social, cultural, and developmental psychology lab is hiring research assistants to help with several projects this semester. Across projects, we investigate prejudice, attitudes, stereotyping, discrimination...

 Education, Cognition & Psychology   Social Sciences

Cooperation and Social Reasoning in Children

Jan Engelmann - Professor, Psychology

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: On Campus

We address questions about the evolution and development of socio-cognitive skills by comparing humans to other animals (mostly chimpanzees, our closest living relatives) and by studying how children develop. How do children reason? How strongly is reasoning embedded in social, cognitive processes? The goal of this project is to...

 Education, Cognition & Psychology   Social Sciences

Developmental Psychology Research in the Gopnik Lab!

Alison Gopnik - Professor, Psychology

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: Off Campus

All research in the Gopnik Cognitive Development and Learning Lab is broadly focused on children's development of cause and effect reasoning and how they learn from and about other people. We are looking for dedicated and motivated undergraduate students interested in pursuing a graduate degree in developmental psychology or a...

 Education, Cognition & Psychology   Social Sciences

How neurologically healthy and impaired humans learn new movements

Richard Ivry - Professor, Psychology

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: On Campus

Research in our laboratory addresses how people learn new motor skills. We study this topic using behavioral and computational methods with healthy and neurologically impaired humans. The neurological studies examine the contribution of different brain structures, especially the cerebellum and basal ganglia, in motor learning to develop functional hypotheses regarding...

 Biological & Health Sciences   Education, Cognition & Psychology

Computational mechanisms underlie motor decision-making and skill learning.

Richard Ivry - Professor, Psychology

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: On Campus

Aims: While humans are remarkably adept at adjusting their movements to operate in uncertain environments, motor control remains a major challenge for AI systems. This project aims to study the computational rules underlying human motor control to improve algorithms for human-like robots: 1. We will conduct longitudinal studies to...

 Biological & Health Sciences   Education, Cognition & Psychology

Testing a novel non-invasive brain stimulation device to safely modulate human brain function

Richard Ivry - Professor, Psychology

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: On Campus

The goal of this project is to test the efficacy of a new non-invasive brain stimulation (NIBS) device that has been developed at Berkeley. NIBS methods have been around for about 40 years and involve applying weak electrical or magnetic fields to the scalp (non-invasive) in order to...

 Biological & Health Sciences   Education, Cognition & Psychology

Healthy Lifestyles as an Adjunct to Medication in Bipolar Disorder

Sheri Johnson - Professor, Psychology

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: Off Campus

We aim to test whether time-restricted eating (in which a person eats during the 10 most active hours of their day) or Mediterranean diet can help reduce symptoms and improve quality of life for people with bipolar disorder...

 Social Sciences   Education, Cognition & Psychology

Misophonia

Sheri Johnson - Professor, Psychology

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 12 or more hours     Location: Off Campus

The goal of this study is to consider cognitive influences on misophonia...

 Social Sciences   Education, Cognition & Psychology

N-ACT: Neurobehavioral affective control training

Sheri Johnson - Professor, Psychology

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: On Campus

The goal of this study is to use cognitive training and cognitive behavioral training to promote better emotion regulation. We are testing a novel program, N-ACT, which involves 8 sessions of practicing executive control tasks while exposed to pictures designed to invoke emotion. In each session, clients will also...

 Social Sciences   Education, Cognition & Psychology

Computer-based emotion regulation training: Computer programming and data assistant

Sheri Johnson - Professor, Psychology

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: On Campus

CALM Program researchers in UC Berkeley's psychology department are seeking a highly-motivated advanced undergraduate (or graduate) student for a volunteer Research Assistant (RA) position. Our team conducts multi-method research examining behavioral and biological mechanisms linking emotion-related impulsivity to mental health problems. We aim to recruit an RA...

 Social Sciences   Education, Cognition & Psychology

Learning, Attention, and Decision Making Throughout Development

Celeste Kidd - Professor, Psychology

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: On Campus

The Kidd Lab studies learning and belief formation using a combination of computational and behavioral methods. In our behavioral experiments, we measure how humans look, explore, play, and learn starting in infancy and continuing throughout childhood. We use eye-trackers to measure visual fixations, touchscreens to study exploration in kid...

 Education, Cognition & Psychology

The Many Faces of Overconfidence

Don Moore - Professor, Business, Haas School, Psychology

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

Have you ever scored lower on a test than you expected, lost a competition to a competitor you thought you would trounce, been certain about a fact only to have Google prove you incorrect? People are frequently overconfident. Understanding overconfidence can help us become more accurate about our self-perceptions...

 Social Sciences   Education, Cognition & Psychology

Overconfidence and Artificial Intelligence

Don Moore - Professor, Business, Haas School, Psychology

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

Human judgments are routinely biased. Can artificially intelligent agents correct for this human bias and achieve greater accuracy in their judgment...

 Social Sciences   Education, Cognition & Psychology

Open Science and Replication

Don Moore - Professor, Business, Haas School, Psychology

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

The scientific world is changing quickly as scientists improve their research practices and correct errors in the published record. This project seeks to test the replicability of published work that is now suspect. This is a chance to play a role in a project in the vanguard of open science...

 Social Sciences   Education, Cognition & Psychology

Graduate Student Research

Don Moore - Professor, Business, Haas School, Psychology

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

Have you ever read a research article and wondered if the authors truly tested the research question they purported to test? The focus of this project concerns the evaluation of research methodology. You would work primarily with a senior graduate student in the lab on her research. It is an...

 Social Sciences   Education, Cognition & Psychology

Development of Early Mathematics

Steven Piantadosi - Professor, Psychology

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: On Campus

We are currently working on a series of studies that use behavioral methods to research mathematical development in children. These studies investigate: 1) the relationship between early mathematics and attention; and 2) the development of algorithmic reasoning in early mathematics. They are funded by the NSF’s Division of Research on...

 Education, Cognition & Psychology

Experimental Social Science Laboratory (Xlab)

Juliana Schroeder - Professor, Business, Haas School, Psychology

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: On Campus

Founded in 2004, the Experimental Social Science Laboratory (Xlab) conducts experiment-based investigations of issues of interest to social scientists. Xlab supports UC Berkeley’s world class research by providing resources such as access to participant pools, experiment coordination, payment support, access to softwares, grants, and more. It also provides technical...

 Social Sciences   Education, Cognition & Psychology

Connecting with Others in the Digital Age

Juliana Schroeder - Professor, Business, Haas School, Psychology

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: On Campus

Technology is rapidly changing, giving humans more options than ever to decide how to communicate with each other. Whereas online options to engage with others are expanding, in-person contact seems to be decreasing. How are these changes affecting the way people connect with each other? How does this affect...

 Social Sciences   Education, Cognition & Psychology

Communicating and Connecting with Others

Juliana Schroeder - Professor, Business, Haas School, Psychology

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: On Campus

If humans are social animals, then why do they choose to remain disconnected with people sometimes? Here we explore when people don’t want to connect with others, such as when they are strangers. In one set of studies, we asked strangers to have conversations on public transportation (e.g., buses, cabs...

 Social Sciences   Education, Cognition & Psychology

The Impact of Human-GAI (Generative AI) Interaction on Society and Organizations

Juliana Schroeder - Professor, Business, Haas School, Psychology

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: On Campus

Human-GAI Interaction is inevitably becoming more common. We seek to address the following research questions: 1. What are the pros and cons of mandatory disclosure of non-political deepfake commercials? Would the disclosure affect people's trust towards the political information they see? 2. How could GAI aid crowd-based...

 Social Sciences   Education, Cognition & Psychology

Research on Children's Linguistic and Cognitive Development

Mahesh Srinivasan - Professor, Psychology

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: Off Campus

The goal of this program is to provide a comprehensive, hands-on research experience to highly motivated students, while making valuable contributions to cognitive science. Our lab's research explores how linguistic, cognitive, and social abilities arise during human development. A central goal of our research is exploring how...

 Education, Cognition & Psychology   Social Sciences

Investigating the Development of Religious Cognition in Hindu and Muslim Children in India (Fluency at reading and writing Hindi required)

Mahesh Srinivasan - Professor, Psychology

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: Off Campus

This project explores how Hindu and Muslim children in India develop religious concepts and beliefs. Our project is part of a larger international, cross-cultural study. We are interested in questions including how children develop concepts of religious and supernatural entities, how children reason about religious norms, how religious beliefs...

 Education, Cognition & Psychology   Social Sciences

Tracking Parent-Child Conversations During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Mahesh Srinivasan - Professor, Psychology

Status: Check back for status     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: Off Campus

During 2020-2021, families were often forced to change their daily routines and encountered newfound or exacerbated life stressors. We are interested in exploring whether these changes impacted parent-child conversations each day. This study researches parents’ and children’s daily routines during the COVID-19 pandemic through surveys that measure activities...

 Education, Cognition & Psychology   Social Sciences

East Bay Financial Needs Study (EBFNS): Exploring how financial strain impacts parent-child interactions

Mahesh Srinivasan - Professor, Psychology

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: Off Campus

Differences in academic achievement between high and low socioeconomic status (SES) children arise at a very early age. Understanding the factors that give rise to these differences is essential for understanding the intergenerational transmission of poverty. The East Bay Financial Needs Study (EBFNS) tests the idea that the psychological experience...

 Education, Cognition & Psychology   Social Sciences

Bio-Acoustical Machine Learning Recognition of Animal Calls

Frederic Theunissen - Professor, Psychology

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

Our laboratory studies vocal communication in animals and would like to develop an automatic classifier for bird calls using advanced machine learning techniques...

 Biological & Health Sciences

Histological Techniques for Assisting Multiple Neuroscience Projects

Frederic Theunissen - Professor, Psychology

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

The apprentice(s) will prepare and analyze neural tissue to assist graduate students and staff scientists with ongoing projects. This will include slicing, mounting (on microscope slides), and imaging of brain tissue to verify where electrodes were placed during electrophysiological recordings, as well as other projects. Apprentice(s) will learn...

 Biological & Health Sciences

Perception of Communication Calls in the Zebra Finch

Frederic Theunissen - Professor, Psychology

Status: Check back for status     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

Project Description: The zebra finch has a very rich vocal repertoire of communication calls that are used in distinct behavioral contexts: peer recognition and localization, mate interactions, offspring care, etc. We previously gathered a huge bank of these calls, classifying them along semantic categories, i.e. groups of calls with the...

 Biological & Health Sciences

Individual differences in face perception.

David Whitney - Professor, Psychology

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: On Campus

The human perceptual system processes faces in an unique manner. Humans perceive faces holistically (i.e. as a whole) rather than as a set of separate features. The face inversion effect is one of the most compelling pieces of evidence for holistic processing of faces. Upright faces are identified faster than...

 Social Sciences   Digital Humanities and Data Science   Education, Cognition & Psychology

Eye movement behavior during autonomous vehicle-human interaction.

David Whitney - Professor, Psychology

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: to be negotiated     Location: On Campus

The recent advent of autonomous vehicles (AV) in the last decade has changed the traditional role of drivers. Currently, autonomous cars being developed and commercialized are not fully autonomous. In fact, commercially-available AV take control of only some of the driving functions, such as speed, or are highly automated...

 Social Sciences   Digital Humanities and Data Science   Education, Cognition & Psychology

How do we register the flow of time in natural movies?

David Whitney - Professor, Psychology

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

Accurately knowing the timing of different events happening around us is a crucial ability of all human beings. In natural scenes such as movies or everyday life, dynamic events could happen either in the left or right visual field. Given that information coming through our left visual field will be...

 Social Sciences   Digital Humanities and Data Science   Education, Cognition & Psychology

Investigating Human Emotion Perception.

David Whitney - Professor, Psychology

Status: Check back for status     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: On Campus

The ability to quickly and accurately perceive emotion is essential in our daily lives. However, how does the brain process multiple sources of emotional information when making emotional judgments? The brain must take into consideration facial expression, tone of voice, body movement, contextual information, and even beliefs in its judgment...

 Social Sciences   Digital Humanities and Data Science   Education, Cognition & Psychology

Research on Infants' and Children's Cognitive Development

Fei Xu - Professor, Psychology

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: On Campus

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...

 Education, Cognition & Psychology

Social contingency and language development

Fei Xu - Professor, Psychology

Status: Full- no new appr needed     Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs     Location: On Campus

This projects explores the origins of referential communication by analyzing the properties of parent-infant and parent-child interactions and infants' sensitivity to parents & contingent responsiveness. We use a combination of methods, including video annotation of video-recorded parent-infant dyads, eyetracking experiments, and behavioral experiments. The age range for...

 Education, Cognition & Psychology

Bilingual and socioemotional development of children in immigrant families - YEDI Affiliated Project

Qing Zhou - Professor, Psychology

Status: Current Term Now Closed     Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs     Location: On Campus

Professor Qing Zhou’s Family and Culture Lab (https://zhoulab.berkeley.edu/) aims to investigate cultural, contextual, and temperament influences on socio-emotional/mental health, academic, executive function, and language development from childhood to young adulthood, with a particular focus on children/youth of immigrant families. We have multiple ongoing research projects investigating...

 Social Sciences   Biological & Health Sciences

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