I am a Research Assistant in the Cognitive Development Lab at Ohio State. In our lab, our research focuses on how children think about information, and how this impacts their overall learning and development. We use a broad range of simple game-like tasks to understand brain processes.
I have been working on the Longitudinal Study in our lab from the beginning. In the Longitudinal Study, we are studying a group of approximately 350 children from age 4 to age 9. This study is looking a memory, vocabulary, and categorization processes of a child, and how they change over time. On this project, I have helped with recruiting more than 350 participants, organizing our procedures for before, during, and after appointments, and making our process more stream-lined and efficient. I also help run the studies using different types of equipment such as an eye-tracking computer, touch screens, and iPads.
Figure 1: This is an example of one of our eye-tracking computers
This position has taught me how to interact with a team, our recruits and their families. While running the studies is generally a one-person job, we must operate as a team because one-person cannot cover all of our operating hours and requirements of this study. We work as a team by standardizing our processes to make sure it is done the same way by every member, every time. We also interact with the families and our participants constantly. Our lab is open 7 days a week, so we are in contact with different families and their dynamics every day. Each participant has 2 appointments per year, so while we don’t see the individual families a lot, we learn how to interact with them and their children though a lot of exposure to many different types of families.