Research Opportunities

Bringing cognitive science students and researchers together for collaboration helps expand our understanding of cognition and supports the field’s growth and prominence.
If you would like to list openings at your lab or other research-related events, please email Professor Melinh Lai at melinh@uchicago.edu.

Research is the heart of an interdisciplinary field such as cognitive science. Below is a list of research labs spanning the core disciplines of the Cognitive Science Major that students may contact for research opportunities. Click the name of each lab to open its website in a new tab.

Awh Vogel Lab

Director: Ed Awh and Ed Vogel

Contact: awhvogellab@gmail.com

Research interests: working memory, attention, electrophysiology

Bakkour Memory and Decision Lab

Director: Akram Bakkour

Email: bakkourlab@uchicago.edu; RA interest form

Research interests: memory, decision-making, fMRI, eye tracking, computational modeling 

Daniel Bartels

Contact: bartels@uchicago.edu

Research interests: Judgment and Decision Making, Consumer Behavior, Moral Psychology, Concepts and Categories

Brain Bridge Lab

Director: Wilma Bainbridge

Contact: brainbridgelab@gmail.com

Research interests: visual memory, memorability, scene perception, face memory, real-world memory

Chatter Lab

Director: Maria Casillas

Contact: mcasillas@uchicago.edu

Research interests: language development; interactional pragmatics; conversation; cross-cultural comparison

Shereen Chaudhry

Contact: chauds@chicagobooth.edu

Research interests: social interactions and relationships,  language and speech, game theory, conflict management, negotiations, teamwork, customer satisfaction

Data Cognition Lab

Director: Alex Kale

Contact: kalea@uchicago.edu 

Research interests: design of data visualization & analysis, inferences, decisions, and value judgments

Development of Social Cognition Lab

Director: Katherine Kinzler

Contact: iramkissoon@uchicago.edu (contact lab manager Isabella Ramkissoon)

Research interests: development of social cognition, accent attitudes

Freedman Lab

Director: David J. Freedman

Contact: dfreedman@uchicago.edu

Research interests: Neural circuit mechanisms of vision and cognition

Goldin-Meadow Lab

Director: Susan Goldin-Meadow

Contact: sgm@uchicago.edu

Research interests: creating language, learning language, co-speech gesture, silent gesture

Human-Robot Interaction Lab

Director: Sarah Sebo

Contact: sarahsebo@uchicago.edu 

Research interests: human-robot interaction

Language, Events, and Mind (LEM) Lab

Director: Monica L. Do

Contact: RA interest form

Research interests: psycholinguistics, language production, event cognition, sentence production, experimental linguistics

Language Processing Lab

Director: Ming Xiang

Contact: mxiang@uchicago.edu 

Research interests: language processing (syntactic parsing, semantic and pragmatics processing), neuroscience of language, working memory, language variation and change

Memory and Perception in Schizophrenia (MAPS) Lab

Director: Molly Erickson

Contact: RA interest form

Research interests: Visual working memory and perception in people with schizophrenia and other forms of serious mental illness

Motivation and Cognition Neuroscience Lab

Director: Yuan Chang Leong

Contact: RA interest form (scroll to undergraduate section)

Research interests: Cognitive Neuroscience, Motivation, Emotion, Decision-Making, Computational Modeling, Natural Language Processing

Neurophysiology of experience, memory, and knowledge

Director: Jai Yu

Contact: jaiyu@uchicago.edu

Research interests: Learning and memory, Neural circuits, Behavior, Hippocampus, Prefrontal cortex, neural oscillations

Phonology Lab

Director: Alan Yu

Contact: aclyu@uchicago.edu

Research interests: Speech processing and speech production, the nature of linguistic representation, language variation and change

Sign Language Lab

Director: Diane Brentari

Contact: dbrentari@uchicago.edu

Research interests: sign languages, gesture, language emergence, phonology, morphology

Stephanie Smith

Contact: stephanie.smith@chicagobooth.edu

Research interests: decision making, eye-tracking, mouse-tracking, computational modeling, consumer behavior

Social cognitive neuroscience laboratory

Director: Jean Decety

Contact: decety@uchicago.edu

Research interests: behavioral economics, developmental psychology, emotion and empathy, functional and structural neuroimaging, morality and social decision-making, political psychology and neuroscience, psychopathy, social neuroscience, social norms

Speech Perception and Production Lab

Director: Melissa Baese-Berk

Contact: mmbb@uchicago.edu 

Research interests: phonology, phonetics, speech perception, speech production, second language acquisition

Abigail Sussman

Contact: asussman@chicagobooth.edu

Research interests: judgment and decision making, financial well-being, behavior change, corporate social responsibility

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