I don't know about overall statistics, but at the end of March I headed up to Boston with several other Caplabbers for the Society for Research in Child Development Biennial Meeting, a huge 4-day psychology conference. The trip started around 5:30 AM Thursday morning, when Laurie picked up Maya, Brian, Drew, and myself for the drive up to Boston. We paused to pick up coffee and some snacks, then continued on to catch Derek's talk abou the overimitation project at a Harvard-organized mini-conference they called "NSRCD" for "Nearly SRCD." His presentation was definitely the most polished of the group, and who could resist Felix (on the screen)?
Derek talking about Project Felix
After NSRCD finished, a bunch of us went to grab lunch and I got to meet some of the Caplab alums. Adena's now a first year grad student at Harvard, Mariko's at Johns Hopkins, Neha's a lab manager at the University of Maryland but she's coming back to Yale next year as a grad student, and so on. They were happy to see us too and hear all the lab news, like the babies Jaws and (Admiral) Hargreaves =P Then it was on to SRCD!
I spent Thursday afternoon tending various paper symposia: 3-4 people give 20-minute presentations with time for questions, then a "discussant" usually comes up to summarize everything and bring up a few more interesting questions. Laurie gave two talks on false beliefs in rhesus macaques and how they reason about essences without language (e.g. what makes an apple an apple?), both of which I've partially seen before but were still cool. I also got to hear Deena (another grad student in Professor Keil's lab) give a presentation on how preschool children reason about fictional worlds, e.g. does Batman think Cinderella is real?
The rest of SRCD passed in a similar fashion, attending symposia and viewing others' posters with various social events in the evenings. Finally, it was Sunday morning...after going to see Venkat (former Caplab manager, now a first-year grad student) talk about the Endowment Effect project, it was time for my poster session!
At first, it felt a bit intimidating to stand there with graduate students and professors browsing through the rows, reading abstracts and asking questions, but I soon developed a 2-minute walkthrough presentation, going through the basic ideas of each experiment and explaining the results. One of the coolest parts was starting to put faces to the names I had read so much about, like Josep Call (a co-author of Primate Cognition) and Malinda Carpenter. It was also nice to meet so many people from around the world: Germany, the United Kingdom, and Australia to name a few.
My poster on the board...it's six feet long!
If any of you are really, really interested in seeing the poster, here's the PDF file (requires Adobe Reader):
Capuchin Monkeys (Cebus apella) use an Experimenter's Unfulfilled Intention to Locate Hidden Food
After that, the conference ended and it was time to drive back down to New Haven...I left physically and mentally tired from doing and learning so much over the past few days, but it was a really great opportunity to present my work for peer critique, getting a firsthand glimpse of another aspect of academic life. Many, many thanks to Laurie, Derek, and the Perspectives on Science program for helping me get involved in research so early and giving me plenty of guidance along the way =D
No comments:
Post a Comment