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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 SciencesSonia 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 SciencesSonia 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 SciencesSonia 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 SciencesAnne 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 & PsychologyAnne 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 & PsychologyAnne 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 & PsychologyAnne 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 & PsychologyArianne 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 SciencesArianne 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 SciencesJan 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 SciencesAlison 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 SciencesRichard 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 & PsychologyRichard Ivry - Professor, Psychology
Status: Current Term Now Closed Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs Location: On Campus
Research in our laboratory addresses various aspects of human performance and cognition, and how these abilities are impacted by degenerative neurological disorders such as Parkinson's disease or cerebellar degeneration. We are looking for an apprentice who could help with running and programming online experiments...
Biological & Health Sciences Education, Cognition & PsychologyRichard 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 & PsychologySheri Johnson - Professor, Psychology
Status: Current Term Now Closed 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 & PsychologySheri 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 & PsychologySheri 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 to begin in the Fall 2024 semester. Our team conducts multi-method research examining behavioral and biological mechanisms linking emotion-related impulsivity to mental health...
Social Sciences Education, Cognition & PsychologyCeleste 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 & PsychologyDon 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 & PsychologyDon 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 & PsychologyDon 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 & PsychologyDon 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 & PsychologyProfessors Emeriti Philip Cowan and Kenneth Polse - Professors Emeriti, Psychology and School of Optometry
Status: Current Term Now Closed Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs Location: On Campus
Background: Uncertainty about the ability obtain affordable, accessible and quality health care remains a serious problem for many Americans. The cost of health care continues to outpace inflation and many Americans, even those who have insurance are unable to afford health care. Therefore, issues related to affordability and access to...
Social SciencesJuliana 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 & PsychologyJuliana 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 & PsychologyJuliana 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 & PsychologyJuliana Schroeder - Professor, Business, Haas School, Psychology
Status: Current Term Now Closed 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 & PsychologyMahesh 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 SciencesMahesh 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 SciencesMahesh Srinivasan - Professor, Psychology
Status: Current Term Now Closed 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 SciencesMahesh Srinivasan - Professor, Psychology
Status: Full- no new appr needed 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 SciencesFrederic 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 SciencesFrederic 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 SciencesFrederic Theunissen - Professor, Psychology
Status: Current Term Now Closed 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 SciencesWilliam Thompson - Professor, Psychology
Status: Current Term Now Closed Weekly Hours: 9-11 hrs Location: On Campus
Understanding the capabilities and limitations of conversational AI systems is a research priority with practical and theoretical implications in cognitive science and artificial intelligence. In this project, we are investigating the capabilities of modern LLMs on reasoning and decision-making tasks using experiment methods from cognitive science. The project includes...
Digital Humanities and Data Science Social SciencesWilliam Thompson - Professor, Psychology
Status: Current Term Now Closed Weekly Hours: 6-8 hrs Location: On Campus
Formal theories of evolutionary dynamics in social networks (https://cocosci.princeton.edu/papers/hardy2023resampling.pdf, https://cocosci.princeton.edu/papers/hardy2022overcoming.pdf) offer powerful ways to understand how ideas spread and change over time, but often rely on simplifying assumptions about learning and reasoning by individuals during social learning. In this project, we are developing new...
Digital Humanities and Data Science Social SciencesDavid 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 & PsychologyDavid 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 & PsychologyDavid 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 & PsychologyDavid Whitney - Professor, Psychology
Status: Current Term Now Closed 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 & PsychologyFei 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, categorization development, social cognition, information search, decision-making 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 & PsychologyFei 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 & PsychologyQing 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