Minds In Development Research Lab

Congratulations to our undergraduate researchers Jake and Yvonne! They both received the competitive Fall 2018 Student Opportunities for Academic Research (SOAR) Award for their contributions to research investigating children's understanding of teaching. This award is designed to fund students who want to get a jump-start on doing research and impacting the world early in their college careers.

Congratulations to our undergraduate research assistants Tatiana Karadimitriou and Olivia Rosenzweig for receiving USC’s SOAR granta competitive grant for undergraduates who are involved in research projects. This semester, Tatiana will be studying the way in which young children receive and give knowledge, while Olivia will be investigating mutual gaze in preschoolers.

Congrats to Allie Khalulyan, our 4th-year graduate student, for being awarded USC's Gold Family Graduate Fellowship and the Organization for Autism Research Graduate Grant! These funds will help her continue her research project examining the effect of eye contact on human perception in young children with high-functioning autism!

Our Lab Director, Dr. Henrike Moll, and PostDoc, Dr. Lily FitzGibbon spoke yesterday on counterfactual reasoning and curiosity at the LABEL conference here at USC!

Our Lab Director, Dr. Henrike Moll, had the pleasure to present at the InterActivity 2017 conference hosted by Kidspace Children's Museum! Kidspace has been instrumental in our research data collection, and we loved bringing the lab to volunteer!

Our student Julia Carboni is presenting work on curiosity in young children at UCLA's PURC (Pychology Undergraduate Research Conference) today!

Last week, Lillie Moffett presented her MID.LA project on future planning in young children at the Society for Research in Child Development!

Julia Carboni is presenting her MID.LA project on counterfactual thinking at the 19th Annual Undergraduate Symposium for Scholarly and Creative Work today!

A changing mindset about minds: in this article in The Conversation, Dr. Henrike Moll shows how scholarly views about the child’s understanding of the mind have changed historically.

The Spring 2017 semester is quickly coming to an end. For MID.LA, this is bittersweet as many lab members will move onto the next stage of their education or begin promising careers. Maya Citron, a senior Psychology and Public Relations double major, shares her plans for graduate school. Though we’re sad to see Maya go, we are proud and happy that she got admitted to several graduate programs, including Columbia University. MID.LA Member Spotlight: Maya Citron How has MID.LA ...helped you reach your goals? MID.LA cemented my desire to pursue a career in Psychology through giving me hands-on developmental research experience. Though I’ve worked with children in different capacities, this experience deepened my research interests and piqued my curiosity. What are your research interests? I am primarily interested in the intersection of child development and psychopathology. Further, I am fascinated with parenting styles and their direct effect on abnormal behavior. What are your plans post graduation? I have accepted an Associate Teacher position at the Brearley School, an all-girls K-12 school in Manhattan, and will be pursuing my Master of Arts in Clinical Psychology at Columbia University. I ultimately plan to obtain a PhD in Clinical Psychology.

Many thanks to Matt Townsend and the BYUradio team for inviting our Lab Director, Dr. Henrike Moll, to speak about our recent work on reciprocity in young children!

Warm wishes for a happy holiday season from the Minds in Development Lab!