Psychology

Mikaela Elliott, a Ph.D. student in Developmental Psychology at The Graduate Center, CUNY, presented her research at the 50th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD). Her poster, “Linking Vocabulary Knowledge with Theory of Mind and Online Social Reasoning in Adults,” explored how language continues to shape social understanding in adulthood and online contexts.

View Mikaela's LinkedIn here

The Opposition People’s National Party (PNP) joins the academic community and the wider Jamaica in mourning the passing of Professor Dr Christopher A. D. Charles, saying Jamaica has lost a brilliant mind and a courageous voice. The PNP has described Professor Charles as a distinguished scholar who dedicated his life to advancing the understanding of Jamaican politics, identity, and social issues.

Christopher A.D. Charles was an American psychologist who taught at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, and at the King Graduate School, Monroe College in New York, and the University of Missouri, Columbia.  He was trained in Political Science, and Psychology (MA, MPhil, PhD) at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Professor Charles was also trained in epidemiology (MS) at the Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University in the City of New York.

Read more: https://jamaica-gleaner.com/.../distinguished-scholar-dr...

Ph.D. student Chun-Ying Tu (Cognitive & Comparative Psychology), under the supervision of Dr. Martin Chodorow, Dr. Patricia Brooks, and Dr. Virginia Valian, has published a conference proceedings paper titled “The t-Value Mirage: Why Parametric Tests on Bootstrap Resamples Mislead in Network Science.”

The study examines why traditional t-tests applied to bootstrap resamples can produce unreliable inferences for network metrics and demonstrates percentile confidence intervals and permutation-based alternatives that yield more trustworthy comparisons, illustrated with bilingual semantic network data. The paper contributes practical guidance for researchers analyzing network properties such as clustering, path length, and modularity, highlighting more robust statistical methods for complex network data.

A link to the proceedings paper will be provided once it becomes available online.

Dr. Sarah Berger, Professor of Psychology at the College of Staten Island and the Graduate Center, has been selected for a prestigious Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award. It is the second time she has received a Fulbright honor.

Dr. Berger will collaborate with Dr. Matej Hoffmann, a leading computer vision scientist, at Czech Technical University in Prague. Together, they will work to address a crucial methodological gap in developmental science: the lack of computer vision tools that can accurately automate posture and pose estimation in infants.

Dr. Berger's research seeks to combine developmental psychology and artificial intelligence to develop tools that can categorize infant posture and movement from video recordings. This work will facilitate the exploration of three central questions in the field: 1) What drives night wakings associated with the onset of new motor milestones? 2) What role does proprioception play in the development of body knowledge? 3) Can computer vision techniques support early detection of developmental issues such as torticollis?

Read more here. Learn more about Dr. Berger's Child Development Lab here.