The Department of Cognitive and Psychological Sciences participated in College Day at Brown, last week.
On April 9, eight Providence high school students, participants in the College Day at Brown (CDAB) program, came to the CoPsy department. Organized by Ruth Colwill, Gabby Modesti, and Julia Marshall, the event included laboratory visits and poster sessions, as well as time to ask questions and cookies provided.
Modesti, the lab manager of the Causality and Minds Lab, shared, “CoPsy is really cool in the sense that you have developmental labs, you have virtual reality labs, you have aging labs, you have neuroscience, and [you have] math labs. Our goal was to create a fun event for students and demonstrate that psych can look like a lot of different things.”
Modesti and Marshall each chaperoned a group. Modesti brought her students to a presentation with Elizabeth Thompson, learning about the development and changes to clinical psychology, and to the Virtual Environment Navigation (VEN) Lab, where students engaged with virtual reality technology. Marshall brought her group to the Computational Cognitive Development and Dog Lab for a dog lab and the Perception, Action & Cognition Lab lab for a color demonstration.
After, labs not featured in the demos gave poster sessions for the students, who were sophomores and juniors in high school.
Marshall, assistant professor of cognitive and psychological sciences, reflected, “I was really happy with the event! I think it was great to interact with high school students and provide them the opportunity to talk with professors, graduate students, and postdocs. I often think the world of research is opaque, especially to those in high school, and having the opportunity to demystify that process was rewarding.”
Both Modesti and Marshall shared that the students had come to CDAB with little knowledge—and potentially little interest—in CoPsy but that they reported learning a considerable amount at the event, with one student already planning to pursue psychology courses in college.
Modesti concluded, “I'm just really excited that we were able to give those [lab] experiences. It would have been so beneficial to me in high school to think about [the different facets of psychology] and have that thought process worked out a little earlier.”
