January 01, 2020
Fall Newsletter
In the spirit of thanks-giving, we want to take a moment to express our enormous gratitude to you for supporting our research. It's only because of you that we're able to do what we do, and thanks to your involvement we now know a bit more about child development! We've been busy sharing this information with other academics from across the globe, but we also want to share it with you. We've attached a newsletter here describing some of our recent findings and accomplishments. We hope you enjoy it!
October 13, 2017
DAX Goes to Portland, Oregon!
The DAX Center had 6 different talks and posters presented at the Cognitive Development Society. Some of our presentations included: children's attitude towards dirty people, differences in tool learning and use between children with and without autism, and children's memory for moral and conventional actions.
April 10, 2017
Children’s Expectations about Conventional and Moral Behaviors of Ingroup and Outgroup Members
Dr. Lauren Howard, in conjunction with collaborators at the Social Cognitive Development Lab at UCSB and the Chicago Infant Learning and Development Laboratory, recently published a new paper in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology.
Children were more likely to expect people who were "like them" (in this case, people who spoke their own language) to follow certain rules. Children did not expect people who were unlike them (spoke a foreign language) to follow these same rules. This may be because children realize that individuals who speak different languages have different practices and beliefs regarding what culturally-related rules are important.
March 27, 2017
The Science Factory's "Science is Amazing!" Festival draws a record crowd
The DAX Center had an 'amazing' time at the The Lancaster Science Factory this weekend, teaching kids (and their parents!) about the development of inhibition and the conservation of mass. We're so happy to have met a whole bunch of new families that that are ready to participate in science!
See below for a great write-up and some pictures of our table a the Science is Amazing festival.
February 22, 2017
Civil Conversation, Vaccinations and Primates
Dr. Lauren Howard recently appeared on WITF​ #SmartTalk to talk about her research on the social and communicative development of chimpanzees and gorillas.
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January 29, 2017
Apes’ Memories Are Enhanced by Watching Humans Perform Tasks
The Dax center generally studies child development, but every once in awhile we conduct cross-species studies with other primates. By doing this, we can learn more about ways in which humans are or are not uniquely social beings.
Dr. Lauren Howard recently published a paper exploring social memory in Chimpanzees and Gorillas. Some of you might recognize the description of this task- it's the same one we were running with human infants last summer!
Check out the F&M write-up and a Psychology Today interview with Dr. Howard below, and stay tuned for another interview with Harrisburg's WITF (NPR) in February!
April 11, 2016
Social Thinking in the Infant Brain Revealed
New research from Professor Howard's alma mater (Chicago Infant Learning and Development Laboratory) suggesting a link between infant motor systems and social thinking!