About the Lab
How did we, starting as prelinguistic infants, extract meaningful information from our world's busy mixture of multisensory stimulation?
Become A Child Scientist
We have several projects where we welcome the refreshing candor of youngsters. Our projects vary between numerical processing in infants and children to how time estimation is affected by emotion. Incentives are offered to our participants, such as a Child Scientist Award or a toy to take home.
Interested Parents
Please look at the Current Studies section of below for FAQ and an overview of our projects.
Current Students
Research Opportunities
Current Projects
We use both habituation and choice paradigms to investigate the development of numerical cognition across the human lifespan. We are particularly interested in whether multisensory information enhances our abilities to discriminate between and perform computations on number.
Is numerical thought possible in other species, which lack language? We are currently testing the numerical abilities of coyotes at USU's Predator Ecology Research Center in collaboration with Dr. John Shivik. We're particularly interested in the development of coyotes' quantitative concepts relative to food resources. We are also probing numerical cognition in dogs in collaboration with Walker Dog Training (Alyssa Walker, Dog Trainer & Behavior Consultant).
It has been demonstrated that emotion affects a person’s estimation of time. In addition to further exploring such findings, we are conducting studies that investigate possible effects of emotion on numerical processing in children and adults.
The effects of videogame playing on cognition and perception are only beginning to be identified. This study looks at the effects of videogame playing on adults' numerical abilities.
Involvement
We involve psychology students undergoing relevant studies into our doctoral specialization. Any students interested in working with this lab, please inquire with Dr. Kerry Jordan directly.