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December 2017

Friends and Alumni Support the Department

Norman H. Anderson Awards

For the seventh year, the Department of Psychology awarded Norman H. Anderson funds for domestic conference travel and research-related expenses. This past year, thirty-two awards were made to students in psychology. Students presented their research at ten different conferences across the country including meetings for the Society for Research in Child Development, the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, and the Vision Sciences Society. In addition, six graduate students had the opportunity to pursue original lines of research in their labs. The projects this past year included a study on space-time associations and space-number associations, research on alternate uses of forgiveness, a study on the relationship between social excuses and sensitivity to disease avoidance cues, and research on insight learning. We are excited to see the many publications and conference presentations that have resulted from this opportunity for graduate students to explore independent research programs.

Earl R. Franklin Fellows

Earl R. Franklin, an alumnus of the College, established a fellowship in 2006 that awards students in the Departments of Psychology and Comparative Human Development merit based funding to conduct summer research. The Psychology Department selected four Franklin Fellows for 2017. This summer Sophie Arnold worked with Dr. Alex Shaw on a project examining which factors affect how children make decisions and how gender affects how children negotiate. Uriel Heller's project with Dr. Boaz Keysar and Dr. Miwa Yasui explored the relationship between multilingualism and attitudes towards mental health as mediated by socio-normative and emotive pathways. In particular, Uriel was motivated by the potential applicability of this research to Asian-American immigrants, a population in which mental health services are highly stigmatized. Tyler Warner's research with Dr. Lindsey Richland focused on how comparative spatial layouts and gesturing interact with the cognitive demands of learning mathematics in the classroom. Finally, Marianna Zhang's project with Dr. Daniel Casasanto involved an fMRI study investigating the role of bodily experience in how we understand language about the actions of ourselves and others.

Montgomery Summer Fellowship

In 2011, Lisa Montgomery made a generous gift to the Infant Learning and Development Lab to support summer research projects related to child development. The Montgomery Summer Fellowship awards a summer research stipend to one undergraduate each year to support a student's research in an area of interest without having the burden of needing to find additional summer employment. This year, the Montgomery Summer Fellowship supported Elizabeth Joyce's research which looks at twelve 18-month-old infants from the United States and the Yucatec Mayan peninsula in their natural environment. Using hour-long videos recorded in infants' homes, Elizabeth marked all times people performed culturally relevant actions on objects around the infant. This project aims to explore action learning opportunities cross-culturally and contribute to the literature on early cultural transmission.

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