Peddie EXP Summer 2018

On the first day, I arrived at Tomasello Lab at Duke a few minutes earlier than 9 and found that I was one of the three people who arrived the earliest. I first met and introduced myself to Amanda, a lab manager, and Celia, a Senior Theses Student at the neighboring Empathy Development Lab (since the PI of the neighboring lab is the wife of my PI and the two labs are both part of Duke Child Studies, their labs basically work together all the time). After familiarizing myself with the purpose of different rooms, I used the first day to finish CITI Program training before I started doing work. Then on the second day, I started working with Celia on her project about how parenting styles relate to parenting behaviors, and how they affect children’s self-regulation. During the first week, 11 groups of parents and their children came to the lab and participated in Parent-Child Play Task. Specifically, the children were instructed to make four different shapes (triangle, house, pyramid, ...

On the first day at my lab, I successfully found my lab and arrived 5 minutes early to Ellen (my lab PI)’s office at Boston College. Thanks to Google Maps! The entire Art and Minds lab was at her office, including the lab manager Nat, my graduate student Jill who led the project I would be working on, five undergraduate students from Boston College, and one undergraduate student from Brown University. I introduced myself to the entire lab, and the lab wrapped up its weekly meeting, where lab members shared new insights and progress on their work. After the other lab members left, I stayed to talk to Ellen, Jill, and Elizabeth (a BC undergrad who worked on the El Sistema project for 2 years already) about the specifics of what I was going to work on. My project, as I had researched before, focused on how orchestral music training affected first and second grade children’s cognitive abilities. It was a three-year longitudinal project, and I was fortunate to work in the lab at the end of...