My lab at the University of Maryland, College Park is looking for talented and motivated graduate students to join us in exploring children’s social cognition and cognitive development. We are part of the Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology at UMD. I hope to recruit a new graduate student for Fall 2022 as part of the doctoral program in Human Development.
In the lab, we study the development and consequences of social learning in early and middle childhood. Specifically, we conduct experiments investigating the nuanced interplay between two critical components of early learning: the capacity to learn important information about the world by making inductive inferences on the basis of limited evidence, and the ability to flexibly and selectively learn from others. Our ultimate goal is to use these experiments to generate broad conclusions about how early cognitive development is fundamentally shaped both by the social context in which it occurs, and by children’s developing social cognitive capacities.
We are also working on projects looking at children's recognition and understanding of misinformation, with an eye towards how we can help children avoid the pitfalls many of us fall prey to when deciding what to believe.
The lab is part of a core group of stellar faculty working on social and cognitive development that also includes Drs. DJ Bolger, Natasha Cabrera, Nathan Fox, Melanie Killen, Richard Prather, Geetha Ramani, Rachel Romeo, and others. We are also part of the thriving developmental science, language science, and cognitive science communities on the University of Maryland, College Park campus, which include leading scholars across a broad spectrum of disciplines, including human development, psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, and speech and hearing sciences. We provide a competitive funding package for graduate students and are half an hour away from downtown Washington, DC.
I would greatly appreciate your help in distributing this message to promising undergraduate and masters-level students who would be interested in pursuing graduate work. Applications should be submitted by December 8 (December 1 for international applicants). More information on the program here. Website to apply here. Interested students should contact me directly at lpbutler@umd.edu. For more information about our research, please visit our lab website at https://www.cogdevlab.umd.edu.