Peddie EXP Summer 2018

At the beginning of the fourth week, I started working on my third project with Charlotte, a PhD student at the Tomasello Lab. For the first part of the study, the child watched a pre-recorded Skype video in which three different adult experimenters name three toys (a dog, a book, and a dump truck) in their own ways. The first two people name them “a fish”, “a spoon”, and “a shoe” respectively, which is obviously wrong. Then when the third person came and was about to name the toys, there was a buzzing sound in the video and the experimenter would ask what the child participants expected the third person to say. After the children answered, the experimenter would take out three toys with different shapes and colors and l et the child play with them for a while. After that, the child would watch another pre-recorded Skype video in which the first person in the previous video assigned three names to the three toys respectively. As she left, a new person who did not appear in th...

During the past week, many people in my lab were preparing for their presentations and posters on their projects. At the end of the week, all students that participated in VIP, a summer research program for psychology majors at Duke, presented their projects to their PIs, peers, and parents. It was intriguing to hear about a variety of topics even though they are all psychology-related. Among the different projects, one that left a deep impression on me was a project about how the race of students’ roommates would affect their willingness to think about questions related to diversity. While I finished working on my first project, I started working on my other projects. For the one that I work with Vivian, a Senior Theses Student at Tomasello Lab, we’ll be learning about whether young children perceive the rules made by themselves and those they make with others differently. Since this project just started, we had to see if the designed experiment would actually work. The ...