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
What’s cooking?… A New Study in Ecology and Intuitive Learning!
Throughout this summer, the CORE Lab had the privilege of working in collaboration with the Russell J. Call Children's Center at Northeastern University to interview children for a new project...
Rebecca Lange visits the CORE Lab!
Last week the lab had the privilege of hearing fourth year graduate student from Tufts University, Rebecca Lange. During the lab’s weekly meeting, Rebecca delighted us with an amazing presentation...
Science in the South End: Many thanks to Club 48 for being a part of our research!
Earlier this summer, second year PhD candidate, Emily Dahlgaard Thor, and CORE Lab research assistants had the privilege of interviewing students at Club 48. Club 48 is an after school program in...