Emily Rocks the Hackathon

Grad student Emily Sumner traveled to the Games for Change Festival in NYC and participated in their first annual Virtual Reality Brainjam Hackathon. Emily teamed with programmers and artists and in 48 hours created a game called "Shima", a virtual reality measure of risk propensity. In this game, you are a photographer on an island inhabited by new species of animals. Your goal is to get as close as you can to each animal and take their picture. The closer you get, the more points you get. But if you get too close, the animal gets scared and runs away. Emily's team WON the hackathon and got to present their game at the Games for Change Festival.  Here is a link to a video of their game, and below is a picture of Emily (at the mic) and her team presenting their game on the huge festival stage. Congratulations, Emily!

Behold, Our Summertime Awesomeness

It's summertime. But is our lab deserted? Nothing but the sound of crickets as a lonely tumbleweed rolls down the hallway? No indeed--our lab is full of life! We continue to advance the field of cognitive science while the rest of the university is quiet.

Gotta Love Peer Review

I am in Washington DC this week, reviewing grant proposals for the NIH (National Institutes of Health). The scientific peer review process really is a wonderful thing. It can be depressing to contemplate the state of the world and the working of a huge bureaucracy like the federal government, but scientific research dollars really are allocated in a very careful and thoughtful way. A bunch of experts get together and read every part of every proposal, discuss them at length, and decide together which ones have the most scientific and technical merit. It makes me feel good about the infrastructure we have built to support science in this country.

Twenty-two??!

What's so special about the number 22? It's the number we were all celebrating in lab meeting this week. It is the number of kids recruited and tested IN ONE DAY by the dream team of Elisa, Julia and Paula, led by awesome graduate student Ashley. WAY TO GO!

As if that weren't enough, the same team tested another 10 kids on Sunday, for a total of 32 over a single weekend! Unbelievable!

UROP 2017

Suttera, Julia and Alleah presenting a study on infants' social preferences 

Saturday was the annual conference of the UCI Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP). Our lab was well represented, and several of our posters were chosen to go up on display in Aldrich Hall. Way to go, Lab!

SoCal 2017

A bunch of our researchers drove down to UCSD for SoCal 2017, hosted by Prof. David Barner's Language and Development Lab. (Thanks for hosting!) And congratulations to all the presenters at SoCal, from our lab and all the other labs, for sharing their work and embiggening everyone's knowledge. Go Team Science!

Amy and Shirley presenting their poster on the Child Risk Utility Measure, or CRUM. (Get it? It's a game with Cookie Monster and it's called CRUM. We're cracking ourselves up over here.)  

Gorgeous Gothenburg

This week I was in Sweden, presenting our research at the Fifth Annual Gothenburg AMBLE symposium on reading, mathematics and the developing brain. Sweden was beautiful, clean, cold, and politically progressive. It was also very expensive, and everyone I saw was white. It was basically a giant Whole Foods grocery store. 

Professor Orangebottom

This week our lab meeting was visited by distinguished scholar Fuzzy Puppet Orangebottom, who helped the undergraduate research assistants (RAs) practice giving 'elevator talk' summaries of their research projects.

Rejection Cake

Some of us in the lab have experienced multiple rejections lately. Grants not funded, jobs not offered, fellowships not awarded, papers and conference submissions getting the big thumbs down. So we took some time last week to celebrate our rejections . . .