Rutgers Cognitive dev lab final round

My final blog post. The summer was great, but first let’s cover the time since my last post. I went to the preschool I had been working on all summer, called seedlings. It was an old church converted to a preschool, which was beautiful, but bad for my lab manager, Alex, who was trying to test kids on their ability to cheat. He told me that he could not run the experiment in the church because other studies had proved that when in the presence of an authority figure (even a representation of one) lower instances of cheating drastically. Michelle ran her study (TFB) with mixed results, some of the kids were very willing, but not very able, and some were neither. Anyway, this was probably my favorite preschool of the three, simply because it was rural and beautiful. I forgot to mention this in my previous blog posts, but all summer kids we recruited came into the lab to run studies. Most of my part was recording the experiment on the video recorder and coding, but it was fun anyway. Before each experiment, we played with the kids to get them comfortable, and so my puppet skills have increased beautifully throughout the summer. This lab was great. Although some of my work was making phone calls and sending emails, I would not trade this lab for any other. By the end of the summer, my lab manager and I were friends due to the fact that we spent long stretches of time alone together on the computers, trying to get people to come into the lab. I learned a great deal about child development and psychology, but I also learned that this is a field I don’t think I want to go into when I get older, children are simply too difficult as test subjects. I will say goodbye to my lab tomorrow, and will see you all in September.