Title: Your child’s brain: How we learn to trust and navigate our world
Blurb: Who do we trust and how do we make snap judgements? Flashback to childhood to decipher what social and cultural clues kids use to understand and navigate the world. Join us as we talk with Dr. Carrie Palmquist about her research in childhood learning and nonverbal communication.
Dr. Carrie Palmquist is a professor at Amherst College. Her research focuses on nonverbal communication and learning. She is currently working to determine if children evaluate others’ nonverbal cues (different gestures) in addition to their spoken language to determine good sources of information. She also explores whether individual differences, previous experiences, and context impact children’s decisions to trust others as good sources of information.
For more information, please check out the child learning and development lab;
https://www.amherst.edu/academiclife/departments/psychology/research_labs/child_learning
If you didn’t manage to navigate to this café in time, don’t worry, below is a video of the entire café. Trust us, it’s great!
We had a lot of great questions during the café that brought up some resources we would like to share with everyone as well as a video that we were unable to share within our timeframe.
- If you are interested in registering for one of her studies or keeping up with her work here is her website: https://www.amherst.edu/academiclife/departments/psychology/research_labs/child_learning
- If you are interested in participating in other studies: https://childrenhelpingscience.com/
- If you need the assistance of a professional: https://www.umass.edu/sphhs/communication-disorders/center-language-speech-and-hearing
- “The Center for Language, Speech and Hearing offers a comprehensive range of clinical services for individuals with communication disorders, differences or delays. Speech, language and hearing services provided by the Center include both diagnostic evaluations and treatment sessions and are available to individuals of all ages. The Center accepts referrals from physicians, health care providers, educators and related professionals, as well as from parents, guardians and self-referrals.”
- To learn more about the issues of WEIRD Science and what that means please see an article written by our very own Emma Dauster: http://thatslifesci.com/weird-science/
- And finally, the video we did not get to watch on an example of eye tracking to show the use of letter boards as a tool for individuals with autism:
Life Science Cafe 