The proposed training program is designed to give predoctoral (up to four per year) and postdoctoral (two per year) trainees the knowledge, skills, and perspective they will need to pursue research careers in developmental cognitive science. The training program aims to integrate the study of cognition in children and human adults, and in non-human primates, on the premise that developmental considerations (both phylogenetic and ontogenetic) illuminate theories of adult human competence, and that developmental questions in turn are illuminated by studies of mature cognitive functioning. The program emphasizes depth in a student's primary research domain (perceptual development, conceptual development, language acquisition, or social cognition), coupled with breadth in the scope of methods that illuminate the domain (behavioral, cognitive neuroscience, and computational approaches), populations studied (from human infants to adults, from humans to a range of non-human animals, from normal children and adults to children with developmental disabilities and adults with neurological impairments, from middle class American children and adults to populations from very different cultures), and questions addressed (from phylogeny to ontogeny). To support this breadth of focus and foster coherence across the different domains of study, all students participate in a common set of courses, in two weekly research seminars, in lab meetings with two research advisors, and in ongoing, topic-oriented seminars in comparative and developmental cognitive science.
| Sarnecka, Barbara W; Lee, Michael D (2009) Levels of number knowledge during early childhood. J Exp Child Psychol 103:325-37 |
| Sarnecka, Barbara W; Kamenskaya, Valentina G; Yamana, Yuko et al. (2007) From grammatical number to exact numbers: early meanings of 'one', 'two', and 'three'in English, Russian, and Japanese. Cogn Psychol 55:136-68 |
