Become a Research Assistant

The advertisements listed below are from faculty members who are actively seeking students to work in their labs.  However, students are welcome to contact any faculty member about participating in research in the faculty member's lab as a volunteer, for course credit, or as a work study student.  You can find more information about doing research for course credit and working in a lab as a work study student in the Undergraduate section of our website.     

Interested in gaining research experience in Cognitive Neuroscience?

Mark Jung-Beeman

We are looking for talented and eager undergraduates to work in the lab, in exchange for course credit (Psych 399). Interested students should have some background in Psychology or neuroscience courses, and have completed Psych 205 (Research Methods).

Generally, we’re interested in the brain processes underlying higher level thinking, such as natural language and problem solving, particularly the more “creative” side of such cognition. We work in several different areas and topics.

  • Problem solving, particularly when people solve problems with insight (the “Aha!” moment).
  • Natural language comprehension – how people understand whole stories, such as drawing inferences or “reading between the lines.”
  • How people understand metaphors and other creative language.
  • Creative cognition generally
  • How mood and attention affect all of these processes.
  • How the two hemispheres differ, and how those differences contribute to all these processes.

We use multiple methodologies to approach these topics, including behavior and brain imaging.

If you are interested, please contact Professor Mark Jung-Beeman, mjungbee@northwestern.edu

 

Join the Motivated Thinking Lab!
Daniel Molden

Research Assistant positions are currently available for Psychology Majors seeking course credit and interested volunteers.  Each quarter there are also a limited number of Work Study positions available (5-10hr/week) for those eligible.

The research that is currently underway generally concerns how people's needs, desires, beliefs, and emotions affect the types of "filters" they apply to the world around them.

  • How do the things that we want to happen affect our perceptions of what does happen?
  • How do our feelings about the "right way" to go about seeking out new information influence what it is that we end up learning? 
  • How do our beliefs about the way that the world “works” (or about what the people who inhabit it are like) alter the evaluations we make and the judgments we form?

If these types of questions interest you and you would like to get involved in psychological research, please contact Prof. Molden at molden@northwestern.edu.

 

Study How People Think
Lance Rips

We invite NU sophomores, juniors, and seniors to apply for course credit in Psychology 397 or 399. Research in our lab is devoted to topics in cognitive science and cognitive psychology. For example, we study how people:

  • reason about cause and effect
  • track the identity of people and objects over time
  • learn new types of mathematical concepts
  • understand the relations between sentences in text
  • use the meaning of verbs and nouns to figure out the structure of described events


There are also work/study positions available on these topics. For more information, email Lance Rips (rips@northwestern.edu). Please let us know of any previous courses you have taken or research that you have conducted that might be relevant to these topics.

 

Social Perception and Communication Lab (SPCL)
Jennifer Richeson

  • Are you interested in gaining research experience in a social psychology laboratory?
  • Would you like to learn more about such topics as prejudice, stereotyping, and intergroup relations, as well as social categorization and identity management?

 

The Social Perception and Communication Lab (SPCL) has openings for undergraduate research assistants this fall!  We have opportunities available for students seeking course credit (i.e., 399, 397) towards a psychology major/minor as well as opportunities for work-study students and volunteers.  Led by Professor Richeson, the SPCL has many exciting projects planned for this quarter. We are looking for RAs to assist with running participants, video editing and coding, data entry, and more!

For more information, please contact Dawn Espy (SPCL Lab Manager) by email,

d-espy@northwestern.edu, or by phone, (847) 491-5647.

 

Cognition and Language Lab
Dedre Gentner

  • Are you curious about how people learn?
  • Are you interested in research expreience with children or adults (or both)?

We have places in our lab for interested, highly motivated students to join our ongoing investigation of the basic cognitive processes in learning and reasoning.  You will participate in various stages of the research process, including design, experimentation, and interpretation.

Some of our research topics include analogical learning, metaphor processing, causal reasoning, and the effects of language on cognitive processing.  We study both adults and children.

For more information, please contact Katherine James by email, katherine-james@northwestern.edu, or by phone, (847) 467-1360.