Month: September 2020

Postdoctoral Position at Georgetown University

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The Laboratory for Relational Cognition at Georgetown, directed by Adam Green, anticipates hiring a postdoc for an NSF-funded project applying cognitive neuroscience methods at the intersection of education and creativity.

For more information on the lab, see our website. For more information about the position, please see the attached description or read more here: https://cng.georgetown.edu/people/join-the-lab/postdoctoral-scientist. With any questions, please contact Grace Porter at cnglab@georgetown.edu.

Postdoc in bilingual development at Concordia University (Montreal)

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The Concordia Infant Research Lab, directed by Dr. Krista Byers-Heinlein, is seeking a postdoctoral fellow to join our dynamic and friendly lab. In non-pandemic times, the lab is housed in the Psychology Department of Concordia University in Montreal, on the beautiful Loyola Campus. We study the development of bilingual infants and preschoolers across language, cognitive, and social domains. Our methods are diverse and include eye-tracking, LENA home recordings, direct observations of parents and children, and analysis of large-scale datasets.

 The postdoctoral fellow will coordinate an NIH-funded longitudinal, two-site study investigating language development in bilingual infants and children, working in close collaboration with Dr. Casey Lew-Williams and the team at the Princeton Baby Lab. The postdoc will be encouraged to develop their own research ideas within the context of the lab.

Requirements:

–       PhD in Psychology, Linguistics, Cognitive Science, or a related field (experience with infants and children is an asset)

–       Excellent organizational and communication skills

–       Strong computational, statistical, and technical skills (knowledge of R is an asset)

–       Commitment to open and collaborative science practices

–       Knowledge of French is an asset

Start date will ideally be prior to January 2021. It may be possible for the post-doc to work remotely until in-person testing can resume, at which point they would be expected to relocate to Montreal.

 Applicants should forward a cover letter, CV, copy of (unofficial) transcripts, and the names of three potential referees to Hilary Killam (kbh.coordinator@concordia.ca). Applications will be evaluated on a rolling basis starting immediately.

CogSci Colloquium: Iris Berent on 9/25

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The Cognitive Science Colloquium Series is proud to present Iris Berent, Ph.D.

 Professor in the Department of Psychology at Northeastern University

Friday, September 25th, 4pm, virtually via Zoom 

Meeting ID: 952 8581 2000
Passcode: R9EXuC
 

Dr. Berent will provide a talk entitled “How we reason about innateness”

Abstract: Few questions in science are as controversial as the origins of knowledge.  Whether ideas (propositional attitudes, e.g., “objects are cohesive”) are innate or acquired has been debated for centuries. Here, I ask whether our difficulties with innate ideas could be grounded in human cognition itself. 

I first demonstrate that people are systematically biased against the possibility that ideas are innate. They consider epistemic traits (specifically, ideas, as opposed to horizontal faculties, such as attention) as less likely to be innate compared to non-epistemic traits (sensorimotor or emotive)— those of humans, birds and aliens, and they maintain this belief despite explicit evidence suggesting that the traits in question are in fact innate. 

I next move to trace this bias to the collision between two principles of core cognition—Dualism and Essentialism. Dualism (Bloom, 2004) renders ideas immaterial; per Essentialism, the innate essence of living things must be material (Newman & Keil, 2008). It thus follows that epistemic traits cannot be innate. A second series of experiments tests these predictions. 

These results show for the first time that people are selectively biased in reasoning about the origins of innate ideas. While these findings from adults cannot ascertain the origins of these biases, they do open up the possibility that our resistance to innate ideas could be in our nature. 

I conclude by briefly considering how the dissonance between Dualism and Essentialism can further account for a wide range of other phenomena, from why we are seduced by neuroscience to why we fear the takeover of humanity by AI, and what we think happens when we die. 

 

Please join Iris for a virtual happy hour (open to all) @ 6 PM via Zoom: https://zoom.us/j/8587400098?pwd=YmszU2h2UmxNZGJpM1ZMMGZ2c1cvQT09

Open meeting w/ all graduate students @1:30 – 2:00 PM via Zoom: https://zoom.us/j/8587400098?pwd=YmszU2h2UmxNZGJpM1ZMMGZ2c1cvQT09

Postdoc at Nanyang Technological University Singapore

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Applications are invited for a fully funded post-doctoral research fellow position in the lab under the direction of Dr. Setoh Peipei (Nanyang Technological University, Psychology Program). Our research focuses on social cognitive development in infants and young children. The current research area of focus is on Singaporean children and adults’ intelligence stereotypes of different gender and racial groups. Information about the lab’s research is available at https://blogs.ntu.edu.sg/babylab

The research fellow will be expected toparticipate at all levels of the projects. The responsibilities include:

·Perform experiments with children and adults online and offline

·Recruit, train and supervise undergraduate research assistants and graduate students

·Perform research duties (e.g., IRB protocol, research grant administration and accounting, maintain budgets, submit reimbursement requests, database management, data processing)

·Engage in academic activities (prepare manuscripts, reports, grants, and present findings at conferences)

·Work with local partners to recruit participants and organize data collection

·Provide general support to researchers in the lab

Required qualifications:

·Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology, Education, or a related field

·Experience working with young children in research/school settings

·Research experience in early cognitive development/ education pedagogies

·Proficiency with Stata, R, and/or JavaScript

·Good team player, excellent communication and public relations skills

·Strong organizational, managerial, and problem-solving skills

·Ability to work independently, under pressure and meet deadlines

·Candidate should be willing to make a 2-3-year commitment

About Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

A research-intensive public university, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) has 33,000 undergraduate and postgraduate students in the Engineering, Business, Science, Humanities, Arts, & Social Sciences, and Graduate colleges. It also has a medical school, the Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, set up jointly with Imperial College London.

Young and research-intensive, NTU is the fastest-rising university in the world’s Top 50 and ranked 11th globally. NTU is also placed 1st amongst the world’s best young universities. The University’s main campus is frequently listed among the Top 15 most beautiful university campuses in the world and it has 57 Green Mark-certified (equivalent to LEED-certified) building projects, of which 95% are certified Green Mark Platinum. Apart from its main campus, NTU also has a campus in Novena, Singapore’s healthcare district.

For more information, visit www.ntu.edu.sg.

If you are interested, please email psetoh@ntu.edu.sg with the following documents:

·A cover letter describing your research experience, relevant skills, and career goals

·A current curriculum vitae with complete list of publications

Please arrange for three referees to submit a confidential report on academic standing and research directly to psetoh@ntu.edu.sg. In the subject line of the email please state Research Fellowship Application. For best consideration, please apply by 1st December 2020. Start date can be in early or mid-2021. 

I will be happy to discuss further by email or via Zoom.

Peipei Setoh, PhD

Assistant Professor

Psychology Program, Nanyang Technological University

POSTDOCTORAL FELLOW, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

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The Department of Pediatrics and Nurture Science Program at Columbia University Irving Medical Center is seeking a postdoctoral fellow to lead a large effort into understanding the effects of COVID-19 on newborns born during the pandemic, and their mothers. The COVID-19 Mother Baby Outcomes (COMBO) study now involves almost 100 researchers and clinicians and has enrolled close to 400 mother-infant dyads. Numerous outcomes are studied with subgroups of researchers focusing on particular areas of interests, such as EEG, HRV, fMRI, eyetracking, neurocognitive outcomes, socioemotional function, growth, body composition, risk of wheezing, and much more. In addition to coordinating the larger COMBO effort, the postdoctoral fellow will lead a randomized clinical trial embedded into COMBO of Family Nurture Intervention (FNI). FNI was developed by the Nurture Science Program as an intervention specifically aimed at improving mother-infant emotional connection. In a prior clinical trial in NICU infants, this intervention improved many outcomes in both infant and mother, with benefits measured up to age 5.
The postdoctoral fellow will participate in all aspects of the research, including but not limited to designing experiments, implementation, management, data storage and organization, analysis, and interpretation. The postdoctoral fellow will directly supervise several research assistants and other trainees (master students, undergraduate students, medical students, etc). The postdoctal fellow is also expected to write manuscripts and grants, and present findings at national and international meetings.
A doctoral degree in a relevant field is required. Given the interdisciplinary nature of the project, the ideal candidate will have superior communication skills, strong managerial skills of both own time and the time of others, and ideally some experience with mentorship of more junior trainees. Initiative, independence and self-motivation are a must and need to be documented in prior experiences and confirmed by prior mentors. The team is seeking someone with an inquisitive mind and collaborative attitude. English fluency is required. Spanish fluency is preferred but not required. Strong computational skills and programing skills in at least one language (C++, MatLab, Python, R) are required.
Start date is flexible and the position is currently open. Interested candidates can send their CV and a cover letter directly to the PI:

Dani Dumitriu, MD, PhD

Assistant Professor of Pediatrics (in Psychiatry)

Attending Physician, Well Baby Nursery

dani.dumitriu@columbia.edu

Postdoc at Temple University Infant and Child Lab

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Post-Doctoral Fellow in Community-Based Playful Learning: Temple University Infant and Child Lab

Post-doctoral fellow position available for an exciting project studying the science of learning in public settings. Can architectural design infused with cognitive and social learning opportunities offer families a new way to support children’s growth and development? The project involves community-based playful learning research with Dr. Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, along with a team of collaborators at University of California-Irvine.

We are looking for an energetic scientist who has worked in the area of playful learning and/or child development more broadly, to work on a National Science Foundation – Advancing Informal STEM Learning (NSF-AISL) funded project. The Playful Learning Landscapes project is designed to promote STEM learning in public spaces using evidence-based, culturally tailored installations and examine the effects of these installations on caregiver-child interactions, children’s STEM learning, and community-wide attitudes towards informal STEM learning. The postdoc will work alongside our team to lead the expansion of the project to Santa Ana from Philadelphia, and will be responsible for managing the training to ensure fidelity and alignment between the two cities. This position offers an opportunity to conduct psychological community-based research that can translate into social impact. Initial appointment will be for a 12-month period and will be renewable subject to performance and availability of funding. The anticipated start date is October 1st, 2020.

As the project manager, the post-doctoral fellow will be expected to participate at all levels of the project. The responsibilities include:

  • Data collection in the field,
  • Training and supervision of undergraduate and graduate RAs and other project staff,
  • Developing new projects with multiple university and non-academic collaborators,
  • Running focus groups,
  • Data coding and analysis,
  • Write-up and dissemination of results for internal reports and peer-reviewed publications,Presentation of findings in national and international conferences,
  • Developing and sustaining relationships with community groups and foundations,
  • Hosting workshops and consulting for local, national, and international partners,
  • Research grants administration and accounting

Required qualifications:

  • Ph.D. in Psychology, Education, Human Development, or a related field
  • Fluency in Spanish
  • Experience working with children/families in research settings
  • Ability to travel to off-site locations that may not be accessible by public transportation
  • Training in one of more of the following areas including cognition, language development, mathematics development, spatial development, executive functioning, community-based research, and play
  • Excellent interpersonal, leadership, writing, and organizational skills
  • Ability to interact with a diverse population of participants
  • Proficiency with SPSS, SAS, and/or R
  • Knowledge of advanced statistical modeling (HLM, SEM, etc.)
  • Programming skills (preferred)

Please send a resume/CV, cover letter, and research statement to Jelani Medford, Lab Manager, at jelani.medford@temple.edu. Applications will be accepted until the position has been filled. Please visit our website (www.temple.edu/infantlab) for more information about the lab.

————————————————————

Jelani Medford

Lab Coordinator
Temple University Infant and Child Lab
Widener Hall, Suite 217
580 Meetinghouse Road
Ambler, PA 19002
Office phone: 267-468-8610

Postdoc position: Dyadic eyetracking, UTokyo

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The IRCN Babylab (Tsuji lab) at University of Tokyo is seeking a postdoctoral candidate for the transdisciplinary project “Tracking developing sensitivity to dyadic interactions” in collaboration with the Softbank Beyond AI Institute and Tom Froese (Embodied Cognitive Science unit, OIST). The goal of this project is to develop a gaze-based minimal virtual reality paradigm to identify infants’ sensitivity to real-time, gaze-mediated dyadic interactions. The successful candidate will be involved in developing, conducting, and analyzing dual eye-tracking experiments in human infants and adults. Physiological measures like heart rate will also be collected. Depending on the candidate’s qualifications, concurrent computational modeling work is also possible. The candidate will be located in Tokyo and primarily supervised by Dr. Tsuji, co-supervised by Dr. Froese.
 
More details: 

https://ircn.jp/en/careers/20200907-tsujilaboratory

—

Assistant Professor
The University of Tokyo International Research Center for Neurointelligence (IRCN)
Personal website: https://sites.google.com/site/tsujish/home

Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Chicago

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 The Department of Psychology at the University of Chicago seeks a postdoctoral researcher to work on a new project focused on the relation between parents’ and children’s attitudes about mathematics.  The postdoctoral researcher will work directly with the institutional principal investigators on research that is aimed at understanding intergenerational relationships in attitudes toward math, and how these attitudes are conveyed. It is expected that the research associated with this position will lead to the development and study of parent and preschool interventions to improve young children’s math attitudes and math learning.

 The postdoctoral researcher will participate in all aspects of research management, development and implementation.  He/she will supervise several full-time employees as well as part-time student employees working on a number of separate projects. 

 A doctoral degree is required in psychology, cognitive science, or education with research interests in child development, preferably mathematical development.  Experience supervising and coordinating the work of others and strong project management skills are preferred.  Must be able to represent the project to diverse audiences. Bi-lingual Spanish is a plus, but not required.

 Start date is flexible; preferred date is October 1.  Interested candidates should send a CV, a research statement, preprints/reprints of papers, and two letters of recommendation to:

 

Susan Levine, Ph.D.                                       

Department of Psychology                              

University of Chicago                         

5848 S. University Ave.                                 

Chicago, IL  60637

s-levine@uchicago.edu

CogSci Colloquium Series: Iris Berent on 9/25

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The Cognitive Science Colloquium Series is proud to present Iris Berent, Ph.D.

 Professor in the Department of Psychology at Northeastern University

Friday, September 25th, 4pm, virtually on Zoom (details to come)

Dr. Berent will provide a talk entitled “How we reason about innateness”

Abstract: Few questions in science are as controversial as the origins of knowledge.  Whether ideas (propositional attitudes, e.g., “objects are cohesive”) are innate or acquired has been debated for centuries. Here, I ask whether our difficulties with innate ideas could be grounded in human cognition itself. 

I first demonstrate that people are systematically biased against the possibility that ideas are innate. They consider epistemic traits (specifically, ideas, as opposed to horizontal faculties, such as attention) as less likely to be innate compared to non-epistemic traits (sensorimotor or emotive)— those of humans, birds and aliens, and they maintain this belief despite explicit evidence suggesting that the traits in question are in fact innate. 

I next move to trace this bias to the collision between two principles of core cognition—Dualism and Essentialism. Dualism (Bloom, 2004) renders ideas immaterial; per Essentialism, the innate essence of living things must be material (Newman & Keil, 2008). It thus follows that epistemic traits cannot be innate. A second series of experiments tests these predictions. 

These results show for the first time that people are selectively biased in reasoning about the origins of innate ideas. While these findings from adults cannot ascertain the origins of these biases, they do open up the possibility that our resistance to innate ideas could be in our nature. 

I conclude by briefly considering how the dissonance between Dualism and Essentialism can further account for a wide range of other phenomena, from why we are seduced by neuroscience to why we fear the takeover of humanity by AI, and what we think happens when we die. 

 If you are interested in meeting virtually with Dr. Berent during the day on Friday, please contact Dr. Theodore: rachel.theodore@uconn.edu 

Carolina Postdoctoral Program for Faculty Diversity

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Dear colleagues,
 
Please forward to graduate students and postdocs who may be interested:
 
As part of a continuing commitment to building a culturally diverse intellectual community and advancing scholars from underrepresented groups in higher education, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Carolina Postdoctoral Program for Faculty Diversity (CPPFD)<https://research.unc.edu/carolina-postdocs/applicants/> is pleased to offer postdoctoral research appointments for a period of two years. The purpose of CPPFD is to develop scholars from underrepresented groups for possible tenure track appointments at the University of North Carolina and other research universities. Postdoctoral scholars will be engaged full-time in research and may teach only one course per fiscal year. This program is funded by the State of North Carolina.
 
The CPPFD is a nationally recognized and extremely competitive program. We typically receive more than 750 applications per year and typically fund 4-5 new postdoctoral researchers per year across the university.
 
Applications for study in any discipline represented on the campus are welcome. Please specify your discipline of interest when applying.
 
The Department of Linguistics is specifically interested in scholars whose work is in any of the following areas:
Computational Linguistics
Language Acquisition
Syntax/Semantics
Sociolinguistics
Hispanic Linguistics
Contact Linguistics
 
Stipend
 
$50,000 per calendar year (STEM disciplines-based on qualifications)
$2,000 per year research fund for research expenses, including travel.
 
Eligibility
 
Applicants must have completed their doctoral degree or terminal degree in their field within the past five years and no later than July 1st of the award year.
The primary criterion for selection is evidence of scholarship potentially competitive for tenure track appointments at the University of North Carolina and other research universities.
An important secondary criterion is the support of prospective departments (see above).
Preference will be given to individuals who are lawfully eligible to work in the United States. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill strongly encourages applications from individuals that have experience, background and/or scholarship that will contribute to the diversity of the campus community.
 
Application materials
 
Cover letter addressed to Vice Chancellor for Research
Curriculum vitae
A statement of research plans (1-3 pages)
A contribution to diversity statement on why you should be selected for this program (1–3 pages)
Writing samples (e.g., publications and/or dissertation chapters)
Two references for letters of recommendation
All materials must be submitted through online application system to be accepted: https://unc.peopleadmin.com
 
Deadline
 
The next application deadline is November 15, 2020 at 11:59 EST.
 
Applications are accepted September 15th-November 15th.
 
Contact Information
 
For questions or additional information regarding the Carolina Postdoctoral Program for Faculty Diversity<https://research.unc.edu/carolina-postdocs/applicants/>, please contact:
 
Jennifer Pruitt
Program Coordinator
jennifer_pruitt@unc.edu
 
Sibby Anderson-Thompkins
Director, Office of Postdoctoral Affairs
sibby@email.unc.edu
 
For questions about the Department of Linguistics, please contact:
 
Misha Becker, chair
UNC Department of Linguistics
mbecker@email.unc.edu