Graduate Study in Developmental Psychology

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Academic Level:
Undergraduates - Senior
Post-Baccalaureate
Graduate Students (Masters)

Description:
The Ph.D. program in Developmental Psychology at UC Berkeley’s Department of Psychology is now accepting applications for Fall. Graduate students receive comprehensive training in developmental science and research, & participate in a vibrant, interdisciplinary community. Our core faculty bring expertise in areas & methods including developmental cognitive neuroscience, cognitive development, language learning, social cognitive development, comparative psychology, cultural psychology, computational modeling, & artificial intelligence. Our area also maintains collaborations with all other areas in the department & with the Institute for Human Development, which advances an integrative developmental science bridging psychology, education, public health, & more. Area faculty & graduate students also interact with scholars across campus through the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences, which supports research exploring the study of the mind and the biological basis of behavior & mental function.

We are strongly committed to equity & inclusion within the Department of Psychology and at UC Berkeley more broadly. Accordingly, we are particularly interested in candidates who have overcome significant hardships in their pursuit of higher education, who understand the barriers faced by others, & who are committed to advancing diversity, equity & inclusion in their service and research.

The following faculty are currently recruiting prospective graduate students into their labs for Fall:

— Dr. Jan Engelmann (Social Origins Lab), whose current research focuses on cooperation, morality, and reasoning in human children from different cultural backgrounds & one of our closest living relatives, chimpanzees.

— Dr. Alison Gopnik (Cognitive Development & Learning Lab), whose current research focuses on children’s exploration and learning of models, theories and abstract relationships. She also is part of the Berkeley AI Research Group & is collaborating with computer scientists to design AI based on childhood learning.

— Dr. Celeste Kidd (Kidd Lab), who studies the processes involved in learning & belief formation, starting in infancy, using a combination of computational & behavioral methods. The lab is one of few in the world that combine technologically sophisticated behavioral experiments with computational models in order to broadly understand knowledge acquisition. The Kidd Lab employs a range of methods, including eye-tracking & touchscreen testing with human infants, in order to show how learners sample information from their environment and build knowledge gradually over time.

— Dr. Mahesh Srinivasan (Language & Cognitive Development Lab), whose current research focuses on word learning, semantic & pragmatic development, sociolinguistic development, normative reasoning, moral & religious cognition, cross-cultural comparisons, & effects of poverty and inequality on parenting & child development.

— Dr. Fei Xu (Berkeley Early Learning Lab), whose current research focuses on probabilistic reasoning in infants and children; reasoning about possibility, probability & modal concepts; social active learning and belief revision; social interaction and early word learning; play and learning, and computational models of hypothesis generation and belief revision in the physical and social domains.

Students interested in working with one or more of these faculty are encouraged to apply. For more information and recent papers, please visit the respective lab web pages & feel free to contact the corresponding faculty members. Interested applicants should apply through the Department of Psychology.


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Page last updated 1/20/2024
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