Corrina KerrAugust 6, 20092min
Anna Shusterman, assistant professor of psychology, recently received a five-year, $716,227 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to study "The role of language in children’s acquisition of number concepts." Shusterman will be evaluating 3-to-5-year-old hearing children in her Cognitive Development Laboratory at Wesleyan. She also will be studying deaf and hard-of-hearing children of the same ages who are learning English to try to determine how language delays affect children's learning of number concepts. The grant, which begins this year, comes from the National Science Foundation's Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) program. The program is only available to non-tenured faculty. Researchers…

Olivia DrakeJune 4, 20091min
Lisa Dierker, associate professor of psychology, and Jennifer Rose, research associate professor of psychology, received a grant worth $521,938 from the National Institute of Health/National Institute on Drug Abuse on May 14. The grant was issued under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Dierker and Rose are researching "Individual Differences in Smoking Exposure and Nicotine Dependence Sensitivity." The grant will be applied over two years.

Corrina KerrMay 19, 20095min
Before the internationally-known social network site Facebook existed, there was Social Psychology Network (SPN), founded at Wesleyan in 1996 by professor of psychology Scott Plous. Three years after launching his site, Plous received a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to enhance SPN. Now NSF is providing a new $700,000 grant to help Plous transform the site into a full featured social networking service for visitors and its approximately 2,000 members across the world. The primary users of SPN are researchers, educators, students, and others interested in psychology. According to the site's usage page, more than 10,000 people from over 100…

Olivia DrakeMay 19, 20091min
Scott Plous, professor of psychology, received a $700,000 grant from the National Science Foundation for the Social Psychology Network. Plous founded the web-based presence in 1996. The grant will be used to transform the site into a full featured social networking service for visitors and its approximately 2,000 members across the world. For more information read the accompanying article in The Wesleyan Connection.

Olivia DrakeMay 19, 20091min
Hilary Barth, assistant professor of psychology, assistant professor of neuroscience and behavior, is the lead author of a new article on the intuitive foundations of children's mathematical thinking. The article, co-authored with collaborators at Harvard University, is titled "Children’s multiplicative transformations of discrete and continuous quantities." It will appear in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology in 2009, in a special issue devoted to the typical development of numerical cognition.

Olivia DrakeApril 13, 20091min
Keera Bhandari ’08/MA ’09 presented her research at the 2009 Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD), held in Denver, Colo. from April 2-4. The poster presentation, co-authored with Hilary Barth, assistant professor of psychology, assistant professor of neuroscience and behavior, was titled "Acquiring Knowledge from Others: Preschoolers’ Use of Testimony." Jessica Sullivan ’08 presented a poster co-authored by Kyle MacDonald ’10, Annie Paladino ’09 and Barth at the 2009 Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD), titled "Children’s Mappings of Number Words to Large Numerosities."

Olivia DrakeJanuary 22, 20091min
Scott Plous, professor of psychology, is featured in an Dec. 2008 article on action teaching in the APA magazine Monitor on Psychology. Plous coined the term "action teaching" in 2000 to refer to teaching that leads not only to a better understanding of psychology but to a more just, humane, and peaceful world, and he manages the web site ActionTeaching.org.