Please only apply if you are willing to make a commitment to work in our lab:

A minimum of 10 hours per week during the semester for a minimum of 2 semesters

Must be a UC Berkeley undergraduate student

Must be fully vaccinated and able to pass a background check in order to work with children

Be sure to apply both on the URAP portal and the Google Form linked on the portal! Individuals who do not follow these instructions will not be considered.

All research in the Gopnik Cognitive Development and Learning Lab is broadly focused on children's development of cause and effect reasoning and how they learn from and about other people. We are looking for dedicated and motivated undergraduate students interested in pursuing a graduate degree in developmental psychology or a related field.

RAs will work closely with a graduate student, post-doc, or lab manager assisting them on all aspects of the research process. RAs will help with experimental and stimuli design; recruiting adults and children ages 2-14 years old; and collecting, organizing, coding, and analyzing data. RAs will meet regularly with their mentors to discuss the theoretical motivations of the studies they are working on as well as the findings of other empirical papers both related to the studies in the lab and important to the field in general.

In this line of work, we are interested in how humans (children and adults) and artificial intelligence systems explore and learn in their environments. Projects include looking at the explore-exploit tradeoff in different contexts, curriculum learning, social learning, concept learning, and gaining a better understanding of language models. We are looking for undergraduate RAs that are passionate about research, artificial intelligence, and cognitive development. Tasks include: data collection in children and adults and LLMs, designing studies, literature review, analyzing data, computational modeling.

Care and caregiving relationships are central to children’s everyday lives. How do children mentally represent the nature of caregiving relationships? What are the unique expectations that structure children’s understandings of these relationships? We are addressing these questions empirically with experiments involving 3- to 9-year-old children. Current projects include costs incurred and altruism in care, expectations for which family members provide care, and asymmetry in care.

We are looking for undergraduate research assistants who are collaborative, reliable, and enthusiastic about psychological research. Research assistants will receive structured mentorship from a postdoctoral scholar and lab manager, and will gain hands-on research experience in a supportive environment. Responsibilities include data collection with children in museums and schools, study material development (stimuli and surveys), data preparation and analysis, and literature review.

Our research investigates the ways in which children and adults explore their environments and build an understanding of cause and effect. We’re particularly interested in how children develop causal models of the world and how they apply past experiences to new situations. Our work seeks to uncover the cognitive mechanisms that drive effective exploration and learning. 

Unlike AI systems, which often struggle with generalization, children excel at forming abstract concepts and applying them to novel situations. Our project aims to bridge this gap by studying the processes children use to build and refine causal models, with the goal of informing more adaptable AI systems that better reflect human learning. We will use games to uncover the strategy and patterns of exploration which enables causal learning in children and adults.

Undergraduates passionate about research and cognitive developmental psychology are welcomed to apply!

In this project, we explore the role of language in children and adults’ representations of caregivers. We specifically investigate how children and adults view the usage of “Parentese”, a voice register characterized by higher pitch, exaggerated vowels, and longer duration, in various caregiving contexts.

We are looking for motivated undergraduate RAs interested in learning more about research in child development, language, and social cognition! Along with mentorship, RAs will gain experience in assisting in piloting studies, designing stimuli for developmental experiments, in-person data collection with children, literature review, and analyzing data.