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.

Rutgers Cognitive Dev lab round 4

  Hi, I just remembered something that should’ve been in my last blog post, I fell off by bike while leaving the lab, which sucked, and has encouraged me to wear a helmet while biking on the busy roads of Busch Campus. Since my last post, Talia request to go to Peru and study John Mikhail’s Universal Moral Grammar by handing out surveys at a bus stop has been struck down by the IRB. On the brighter side, I preschool that we(I) have been in contact with all summer, trying to get their O.K. to do a study at their school, has finally agreed and established a date next week. This week however, I went to the Douglas Campus Daycare, a daycare for the staff of Douglas Campus. It was interesting. I went with Michelle, Lu (who both ran the same experiments as last time) and Sydney, who was running an experiment called Good Intention Default. Essentially, she was trying to show that when people evaluate a trolley problem, they assume that the character acting has the best possible intentions for all characters. DCD was interesting, as it is used by a lot of child labs as a place to get subjects. Most of the kids were familiar with taking part in studies, and were far more enthusiastic than the last preschool I went to. Most were very smart, passing all control questions and providing promising results for the grad students. Anyway, this was a much better preschool for both me and the grad students.

Rutger Cognitive Lab round 3

  This week, I presented a paper to my lab in one of our weekly lab meeting. As our lab takes lots of RAs, they try to teach them as much as possible, one of the ways being through these weekly meetings in which every RA reads the same paper and one presents it. The article I presented was “Universal Moral Grammar” (John Mikhail.) It was not a research paper, rather, it is meant to do to Moral Grammar that which Chomsky did to language. Mikhail proposes that we are all born with an innate ability to develop similar moral decisions. However, abnormal development (abuse, psychopathy, ect.) can hinder this development. He cites as evidence the fact that most cultures, however different, have bans on battery of all forms. Also, he claims that the intuition for a set of trolley problems is similar across cultures. Trolley problems are hypothetical situations in which a trolley is headed down a track to 5 people, and a separate character presses a button to divert the train onto another track where only one person is standing. The purpose is to see what people’s intuition on the morality of the characters actions are. There have been dozens of variations on the trolley problem which attempt to explain why some situations are acceptable and others are not. From asking people about their intuitions, the “Doctrine of double effect” has been established. The doctrine attempts to set parameters to predict if people will think if something is morally acceptable. There are several stipulations, but the most important are these; if the harm outdoes the good of an action, or if harm is a direct means of achieving good, people find it morally objectable. Anyway, presenting to a group of grad and college students was a nerve racking experience, but I think I did well.

Rutgers Cog Dev Lab round 2

        This week in the Rutgers Cognitive Development lab, I got to visit a preschool to test children. I went with the two grad students, Lu and Michelle. The kids in the preschool were aged three to five and we tested about fifteen. Most of what I did was filling out coding sheets (the sheets with the kid’s responses) and brining the kids in and out of the room where we were testing. Michelle ran Triple False Belief by telling a story and Lu ran Double False Belief on an eye tracker TV monitor. Both studies test how many false belief states children can keep track of, where a false belief is a when a character has an incorrect belief about the thoughts or actions of another character. TFB was done through a story, and DFB was done through video. Unfortunately, most of the kids failed the control questions for TFB (questions to make sure they understand the facts of the story.) However, it was a good experience to go to my first preschool.