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
Essentialism and Criminality
PhD candidate Yian Xu has recently finished an original manuscript on essentialism and crime. Yian’s research seeks to investigate how people essentialize crime concepts and what might be the...
Between Soccer and Research: Leading a Double Life
Working in a lab is no easy job (all-consuming in fact), but our extraordinary research assistants prove to us every year that, with passion, you can manage to be an exceptional scientist as well as...
Four Weeks in London!
Over the summer, three amazing CORE Lab team members, Eliza Grossman, Julia Tracy and Hunter Coury, had the opportunity to visit London for a Psychology Dialogue. They had an enriching experience...