Principal Investigator
Dr. Susan Levine
Susan Levine is a professor in the Department of Psychology where she serves as chair of the developmental psychology program. She is also a core faculty member on the newly formed Committee on Education at the University of Chicago. She received her B.S. at Simmons College and her Ph.D. at M.I.T. Dr. Levine's research examines how variations in home and school input affect the cognitive development of children, including language, spatial and mathematical skills. She also examines plasticity of language and cognitive skills following early brain injury.
Email: s-levine@uchicago.edu
Link to: Susan Levine's CV and publications
Graduate Students
Lauren Applebaum
I have two main areas of interest. My primary work is on using spatial tools such as structural alignment and gesture to improve learning in education situations. We are investigating the role of these spatial tools in both a bridge-building class at the Museum of Science and Industry and in a one-on-one experimental setting. My second area of interest is in language development. One language development study I'm involved with looks at early parent-child book reading interactions and later child outcomes (such as vocabulary and reading comprehension skills).
email: lapplebaum@uchicago.edu
Eliza Congdon
I am currently interested in studying the development of mathematical concepts in young children, specifically geometry and more general spatial skills. I am investigating the role of gesture versus action in teaching children about linear measurement and mathematical equivalence and I plan to develop an assessment of young children's intuitive understanding of angle as a spatial concept. I am also interested in the process of translating laboratory findings to real world educational settings.
email:econgdon@uchicago.edu
website:http://babylab.uchicago.edu/welcome.html
email: dominicgibson@uchicago.edu
I am interested in how parental input in the pre-school years affects children's numerical cognition. I am currently investigating what types of naturalistic social, linguistic, and experiential contexts are most helpful to children's early development of numeracy skills. In addition, I am interested in how early number input relates to later academic success in math and science.
email: lizgunderson@uchicago.edu
website: http://home.uchicago.edu/~lizgunderson/
Naveen Khetarpel
I am fascinated by the diversity of natural languages and the range of human thought. My research pursues these interests through cross-linguistic analysis of lexical systems and experimental study of perception and conception in speakers. Recent projects have focused on color terms and spatial adpositions. This work aims toward a better understanding of the cognitive universals that have shaped languages into systems that human infants can learn and the role language comes to play in adult cognition.
email: khetarpal@uchicago.edu
website: http://psych.uchicago.edu/~khetarpal/
I received my BA in early childhood education and psychology from Duksung Women’s University, South Korea, in 2007 where I was trained as a teacher. In 2009, I received my MA in Psychology in the education program from Teachers College, Columbia University. My research interests include impacts of different types of academic motivation on anxiety and future performance in both child and adult populations, and intervention for math anxiety.
Postdocs
Erica Cartmill
My research interests center on the evolution of language and the cognitive antecedents to language. I am particularly interested in the relationship between gestural and vocal communication on both evolutionary and ontogenetic timelines. My current work explores the relationship between gesture and speech in child language acquisition, and examines the role gesture plays as language moves beyond the 2-word stage and complex grammatical constructions begin to emerge. My previous research involved the study of gestural communication and social cognition in orangutans. By combining results from both lines of inquiry, I hope to identify cognitive and communicative structures that exist prior to the development of full-blown language.
email: cartmill@uchicago.edu
website: http://home.uchicago.edu/~cartmill
Ece Demir
I am interested in early language development of both typically-developing and atypically-developing children. My current research focuses on cross-linguistic variation in speech and gesture. Specifically, I am interested in whether gesture can contain information that is not expressed in speech, and thus can be used to augment the tools provided by children's spoken languages. My second line of work focuses on early language learning in children with early unilateral brain injury. Currently, I am investigating their verb learning and its relation to the development of representations that underlie verbs in other domains, e.g. gesture and motor abilities.
email: ece@uchicago.edu
Website:(http://psychology.uchicago.edu/academics/doctoral/cognition/students/ecedemir.shtml)
Raedy Ping
I am interested in the relationship between lab research and classroom practice--how we can creatively and effectively apply findings from the lab to actual classroom and other naturalistic learning interactions? My lab research centers generally on how humans use their bodies to represent information, and how we communicate these representations with one another, especially during learning interactions. I also focus on translating lab findings about spatial intelligence and early geometry understanding into classroom practices and curricula.
email: rping@uchicago.edu
Website: http://psychology.uchicago.edu/people/nonfaculty/ping.shtml
Chris Young
I am interested in how representations of spatial and numerical information develop together. I approach this issue quantitatively by refining models of basic processes, like estimation, and using them to improve performance on educationally relevant measures. This focus allows for the application of informative, techniques, such as adaptive experimental design, to increase the effectiveness of training in the lab and classroom.
email:youngcj@uchicago.edu
Research Assistants
Rebecca Blackwell
Rebecca received her B.A. in psychology from Northwestern University in 2011, joining the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center soon afterwards as a Research Assistant. At Northwestern University, Rebecca studied verb learning in young children and the effect of culture on children's biological concepts. She hopes to learn more about spatial intelligence and development in young children as an RA. She plans to pursue a graduate degree in Developmental Psychology in the upcoming years.
email: rblackwell@uchicago.edu
Claire Bradley
Claire is a Research Assistant at the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center. She graduated from the University of Minnesota in 2008 with a B.A. in Psychology and Spanish. While at the University of Minnesota she was involved in research in the areas of auditory perception and linguistic relativity. She plans to pursue a graduate degree in Developmental Psychology.
email: cbradley1@uchicago.edu
Hannah Degner
Hannah received her B.A. in Psychology and History from the University of Illinois and joined the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center at the University of Chicago as a research assistant in 2008. She is also involved with the Language Development Project, visiting the children with early brain injury to investigate the relationship between language development and spatial cognition. Through SILC, she works on research that examines how spatial information can help or hinder children's understanding of number.
email: hdegner@uchicago.edu
Joanna Schiffman
Joanna is a research assistant at the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center. She graduated from Wesleyan University in 2011 with a degree in psychology and a certificate in cognitive science. While at Weselyan, she worked in a cognitive development lab, studying children's number cognition. She also spent a summer at Northwestern University studying "grasping errors" in infants and how they handled photographic representations of objects differently than the actual three-dimensional objects. Joanna is interested in how children learn math and how to use cognitive development research to improve curricula. She plans to pursue a graduate degree in developmental psychology.
email: jschiffman@uchicago.edu
Employment Opportunities
Alums
Graduate Students
Stacy Ehrlich - Senior Research Analyst, Consortium on Chicago School Research
Mee-Kyoung Kwon - Mee-Kyoung has accepted a post-doctoral position at the University of California at Davis.
Stella Lourenco - Assistant Professor at Emory University
Department of Psychology
532 Kilgo Circle, Room 323
Atlanta, Georgia 30322
Office phone: 404-727-7448
Lab phone: 404-727-2988
Faculty website: http://psychology.emory.edu/cognition/lourenco/index.html
Lab website: http://psychology.emory.edu/cognition/lourenco/lab
Linda Whealton Suriyakham - Linda is a Clinician at the Stonington Institute in Stonington, CT, and works with adolescent girls in an inpatient psychiatric hospital. She is doing postdoctoral clinical coursework at the Massachusetts School for Professional Psychology in Boston, MA.
email: whealton@uchicago.edu
Perla Gámez: Perla is currently a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Education at Harvard University
email: Perla_Gamez@gse.harvard.edu
Eve Sauer: Eve is working as a postdoctoral fellow at University of Pittsburgh.
email: eal48@pitt.edu
Shu-yu Yang
Postdocs
Ty Boyer
I was a postdoctoral fellow in the University of Chicago, Department of Psychology from August 2005 to August 2007. I received a BS from Arizona State University in 2000, and PhD from the University of Maryland in 2005. While at UofC Susan Levine, Janellen Huttenlocher, and I did a number of projects that analyzed the development of quantitative and spatial reasoning. One large project involved a detailed analysis of elementary school aged kids abilities to process proportional information, and the sorts of things that might contribute to errors in solving proportion problems. I am presently a postdoc in the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences at Indiana University and can be reached at tywboyer@indiana.edu .
Matt Carlson: Matt is working as an assistant professor at the University of Texas, El Paso
Joanna Cannon
Shannon Pruden Dick: Shannon is working as an assistant professor at Florida International University
Joan Fisher: Joan is teaching at the University of California at Long Beach
Raquel Klibanoff
Tracy Soloman
Moshe Krakowski: Moshe is currently an assistant professor at Yeshiva University
Kristin Ratliff: Kristin is a project director at Western Psychological Services
Elena Zinchenko
RAs and other affiliates
Karyn Brasky
Elaine Croft
Kristin Duboc
Jennifer Griffin
Melissa Herrett
Elizabeth Hickey
Erica Mellum
Molly Nikolas
Jana Oberholzer
Lilia Rissman
Jessica Saunders
Becky Seibel
Julie Wallman
Alexa Webster-Clark
