Cognitive Development Lab

I have been at the lab for almost three weeks so far and I have really come to like it considering how the first week and a half went. I arrived on the first day and met my lab manager, Alex, and another RA, Kafu, who is a junior at Rutgers. The first week and a half of the lab is dedicated to training, and since most RAs only come in once a week and I come in every day, I received the same training every day for a week, which was frustrating, especially considering that the first training was on cold calling, or dialing up strangers and hoping they would want to bring their children into a lab. As time went on though, the work got more interesting. Several of the more senior RAs have asked me to help them with the details of some of their work, and I got to go with two PhD students to a preschool to do testing, which was fun.

At the lab there are 14 or so RAs, 11 of whom are new, two who have been there for one semester, and one who has been there for three years. There are also 3 graduate students, one post doc., and a lab manager. The grad students, post doc, manager and senior RA are all doing original research in child cognition, morality, false belief and other topics related  to Theory of Mind. Most of these studies involve either an eye tracker, for studies on children who cannot talk, and stories with question on the intentions of the characters at the end for kids who can talk. Most subjects are I may have been wrong about the fact that children develop a theory of mind at four, as a paper (Onishi and Baillargeon 2005) has provided proof, using an eye tracker to understand the mental state of the subect, that kids may have a theory of mind as young as 15 months, raising the question: Why do 3 year olds fail a verbal test (explicit test) for theory of mind but pass a test using an eye tracker(implicit test)? Anyway, here's a picture of some of the people in my lab

The person on the left is lu, a grad student. The guy in the sombrero is the lab manager, Alex. The girl in the white strippy t-shirt is Cami, an RA, and to her left is Michelle, another grad student. Behind Michelle is Katya, the post doc, and the woman next to her is Sydney, a grad student. Next to Sydney is Alan Leslie, the PI, who I've never met. 

This is Talia, the senior RA whose asked me for some help as she prepares for a research trip to Peru to study universal moral grammar