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, 2nd year graduate student, Goes on Adventure to Mumbai, India
Jessica Leffers, a 2nd year graduate student at the CORE Lab, spent some time in Mumbai, India with her grandmother in mid February. Here she is pictured at Mhalaxmi Temple, The Hanging Gardens, and...
Dr. Coley and Dr. Helmuth Speak about Ecological and Psychological Perspectives on Climate Change
The CORE Lab's own Dr. John D. Coley and Dr. Brian Helmuth from the Helmuth Lab both spoke at 'The Science for the Public 2018 Science Lectures' at MIT. A plethora of research supports the notion...
Our Wonderfully Bizarre CORE Lab Mascot: The Platypus
Imagine a creature with four limbs, a tail, and an immense love of swimming. The creature has brown fur, and webbed feet. “Ahah,” you think to yourself all too confidently, “It must be an otter!”...