Eliza Congdon (pictured left) and Miriam Novack (pictured right) are fifth year graduate students in the Department who have been collaborating on research projects since they met as first year students. Drawing on expertise from their advisors, Dr. Susan Goldin-Meadow and Dr. Susan Levine, many of Eliza and Miriam’s collaborations focus on how watching and producing gesture supports math learning and spatial thinking. Their first collaborative project compared the role of using action and gesture to teach children math. The results, published in Psychological Science earlier this year, showed that gesturing during a math lesson supported generalization while producing actions on objects, limited learning. This study inspired multiple follow-up projects, including an eye tracking study funded by a Norman H. Anderson research grant here at the University of Chicago and a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study in collaboration with researchers at Indiana University. The follow-up projects aim to examine the neural and behavioral mechanisms of learning through gesture. Eliza and Miriam are also interested in the development of gesture production in early childhood. This past July, they presented a talk at the International Conference on Gesture Studies in San Diego relating individual differences in rates of gesture production to spatial thinking outcomes later in childhood. Others have also been involved in several of these collaborations including post-doctoral scholar, Elizabeth Wakefield, and fourth year graduate student, Dominic Gibson.

Geoff Brookshire (pictured left) and Stephen Gray (pictured right), graduate students who work with Daniel Casasanto and David Gallo, respectively, are collaborating on a project using transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to explore the neural activity involved in memory monitoring. tDCS is a technology that increases the excitability of a targeted brain area by applying a direct current through the scalp. The goal of the project is to determine the differential contributions of left and right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) to diagnostic and disqualifying monitoring processes, both of which help us screen our memory for accuracy and prevent memory distortion. Previous fMRI work in the Gallo lab has demonstrated the importance of both left and right dlPFC to these processes. According to preliminary results from Geoff and Stephen’s experiment, using tDCS to boost excitability in left dlPFC leads to improved performance in episodic memory tasks sensitive to diagnostic monitoring. In the next year, the project will expand to include older adult participants in hope to extend the use of tDCS to alleviate some of the memory monitoring deficits associated with the natural aging process. A Norman H. Anderson research grant helped to make this project possible.

Graduate students Samantha Fan (pictured left) and Zoe Liberman (pictured right) are  collaborating with Boaz Keysar, Katherine Kinzler, Amanda Woodward on a project that investigates how the bilingual experience influences early social cognition. In their first study, they found that bilingual children demonstrate enhanced perspective taking, suggesting that early exposure to diverse linguistic environments may aid communicative abilities. Future work will examine how these socio-communicative advantages develop across the lifespan starting in infancy throughout adulthood. This project developed out of Samantha and Zoe's shared interests across developmental and cognitive psychology laboratories. Merging methodologies and expertise has allowed the research team to use existing paradigms to create an innovative program of research.