Minerva Psychology Group — Summer 2021

Meetings

During the summer, it is okay to attend just the meetings you want to. Specifically, the Summer will consist of a core group of interns working with Prof Sheskin, and we are welcoming any additional students to visit our weekly summer intern meetings. (During the academic year—Fall and Spring—it is different: students must commit to attending all the meetings during the academic year.)

This section contains information to prepare for each meeting. You will usually be able to find information at least one week in advance. All meetings will take place on Zoom, at the same link as the meet-and-greet meeting.

Initial meetings with just the summer interns took place before this list starts.

7 June 2021

This meeting will have short presentations and discussions about three platforms for online developmental science research: TheChildLab.com at Yale, Lookit.mit.edu at MIT, and ChildrenHelpingScience.com across very many universities.

To prepare for this meeting: look at each of the three URLs above.

14 June 2021

This meeting will discuss what online data collection methods are likely to look like in the year 2030. What infrastructure and methods will exist? What advantages will they have compared to what exists in 2021 (both in-person and online)? What difficulties must be successfully navigated to bring us from now to this future vision?

To prepare for this meeting, think about the above questions as you read this paper:

Sheskin, M., Scott, K., Mills, C. M., Bergelson, E., Bonawitz, E., Spelke, E. S., ... & Schulz, L. (2020). Online developmental science to foster innovation, access, and impact. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 24(9), 675-678.

21 June 2021

28 June 2021

5 July 2021

12 July 2021

19 July 2021

26 July 2021

19 March 2021

The topic today will be using the internet for data collection with children. You should spend at least 1 hour preparing, and read at least this paper (click name to go to open access version, where you can read it online or download a formatted PDF):

Sheskin, M., Scott, K., Mills, C. M., Bergelson, E., Bonawitz, E., Spelke, E. S., ... & Schulz, L. (2020). Online developmental science to foster innovation, access, and impact. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 24(9), 675-678.

If you spend more time, here are suggestions:

  • visit the websites listed in the paper, including TheChildLab.com, Lookit.mit.edu, and ChildrenHelpingScience.com

  • look up some of the co-authors on the paper to see who is thinking about this topic (looking at these three would give a sense of the range of authors involved, especially regarding what they research: Fei-Fei Li, Julian Jara-Ettinger, Elizabeth S. Spelke)

  • look at sample scientific papers that have been published using online data collection with children—a list can be found here (suggestions: Chuey et al., 2020; Nussenbaum et al., 2020; and the two Scott papers from 2017).

  • look at the Lookit documentation starting at this link to get a sense of what it is and how new people can get involved

26 March 2021

The main topic today will be “social evaluation by preverbal infants” for both the content (i.e., development of morality) and the methods/measures (e.g., looking time). This is the reading you should definitely do (slowly and carefully):

If you spend more time, here are some suggestions:

  • Watch the “60 Minutes” news coverage of this line of research at this link (there are other places to see this if this channel is blocked in your location)

  • Learn about the replication crisis with this Minerva Guide (for the current version of SS110) and then read about attempts to replicate or build on the study, such as this one and this one.

  • Read about even more advanced behaviors (by slightly older infants/toddlers) such as this one.

  • Learn about the distinction between “knowing” about good behavior and actually taking costs to behave in those ways, with this paper and this paper.

  • In general, this book is a wonderful overview of human morality (what it is, where it comes from, etc.).

2 April 2021

The main topic today will be the peer review process.

  1. Watch this 2-minute video as a brief introduction.

  2. Watch this 12-minute video as a brief introduction to limits of peer review

  3. Read sample peer reviews (and a cover letter replying to them) in this document. Note that you should not worry about the details (especially since you have not read the papers these are reviews for!); your goal should be to gain insight into what the peer review process looks like.

If you have more time to spend on this, here are some additional things to look at:

  • The paper that was published following peer reviews #4-6 in the required reading (link)

  • Minerva Guide for the replication crisis

  • Simmons, J. P., Nelson, L. D., & Simonsohn, U. (2011). False-positive psychology: Undisclosed flexibility in data collection and analysis allows presenting anything as significant. Psychological science, 22(11), 1359-1366. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0956797611417632

  • Munafò, M. R., Nosek, B. A., Bishop, D. V., Button, K. S., Chambers, C. D., Du Sert, N. P., ... & Ioannidis, J. P. (2017). A manifesto for reproducible science. Nature human behaviour, 1(1), 1-9. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-016-0021

9 April 2021

To start preparing for the April 16th meeting with guest speaker Rosie Aboody, we will discuss this paper (link) by Julian Jara-Ettinger (who is Rosie’s PhD advisor).

16 April 2021

Guest talk by Yale PhD student Rosie Aboody. Before the meeting, please read her recent paper (link) to prepare. The title of her talk will be “Beyond representation: Understanding conceptual development in Theory of Mind”

General Background

This section contains general background to supplement the knowledge you are building each meeting. We might sometimes choose to focus on a paper in this section (i.e., it might appear as the required reading for a meeting). This section will likely have more resources added over time.

General Psychology Resources

Some Videos about Developmental Psychology