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
The Science of Bad Vibes: Dr. Coley’s Input!
The director of the CORE lab, Dr. John Coley, was recently featured in a Popular Mechanics article: "The Science of Bad Vibes: Can Some Places Really Hold Onto Negative Energy?" The article...
Current Research in the CORE Lab: The Impact of Anthropocentric Thinking in Biology Education
Think about the neuroscience of emotion, an incredibly complex process involving the combination of internal stimuli from the body, external stimuli from surroundings, and past experiences to guide...
New CORE Lab Publication: Beliefs about Human-Nature Relationships and Implications for Investment and Stewardship Surrounding Land-Water System Conservation
New CORE Lab Publication: Beliefs about Human-Nature Relationships and Implications for Investment and Stewardship Surrounding Land-Water System ConservationClick here for the full paper This past...