About the CORE Lab
Established in 1998, the Conceptual Organization, Reasoning, and Education (CORE) Lab is located in the Psychology Department at Northeastern University. The CORE Lab provides a challenging and supportive environment in which undergraduates, doctoral students, post-doctoral researchers, and Lab Director Professor John Coley collaboratively explore basic questions in cognitive science about how people organize and use their knowledge about the world.
This lab’s work is framed by the view that humans possess powerful intuitive frameworks arising from an interaction of evolved cognitive structures, personal experience, and culture. These “cognitive construals” provide fast and efficient, but potentially fallible guidelines for dealing with complex information. We are committed to applying cognitive science to domains like education, environmentalism, and social relations, and have built an extensive network of cross-disciplinary collaborations to do so.
Our work has been supported by over $3 million in grants from the National Science Foundation, and we are known for providing students from a variety of disciplines, backgrounds, and interests with the opportunity to contribute to cutting edge cognitive science research that matters.
In the CORE Lab, we try to answer questions like:
How do we organize what we know?
How do these processes change with development and experience?
How do we use that organization to make guesses about what we do not know?
What are the implications of these basic cognitive processes for real-world issues like education, social relations, and environmental literacy?
News from the CORE Lab
Jessica Leffers Wins Dean’s Excellence Award
On April 22nd, Jessica Leffers, 5th year graduate student in the CORE Lab, received the Dean’s Graduate Student Excellence Award in Teaching from the College of Science. She has excelled throughout...
New CORE Lab Publication: Do I Know You? The Role of Culture in Racial Essentialism and Facial Recognition Memory in the Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition
This past February, Jessica Leffers, fifth year doctoral student in the CORE Lab, published her work in the Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition. Her work examined the role of culture...
CORE Lab Undergraduate Shrreya Aagarwal Receives Multiple Awards!
Recently, Shrreya Aagarwal, an undergraduate Research Assistant in the CORE Lab, received two awards to fund her research curiosities. The two grants that Shrreya received are the Honors Propel...