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: