Chen Yu

Seminars in Developmental Psychology. Three lecture hours a week for one semester. May be repeated for credit when the topics vary. Prerequisite: Graduate standing and consent of instructor.

"Natural Human Behavior in the Real World"

The field of psychological research has been largely influenced by the successful methods of experimental psychology in the 20th century. Many psychology findings have been obtained from simplified and controlled lab situations. However, it has become clear that many of those laboratory findings only hold true in the deprived laboratory conditions but cannot be generalized and replicated in the real world. The goal of this course is to train students in a number of fundamental skills that they will use to conduct psychological research “in the wild” to examine and understand human behavior in complex real-world environments. With a hands-on training approach, students will learn how to design experiments that will be conducted in the real world, how to use mobile sensing technology to collect behavioral data, and how to discover behavioral patterns by analyzing fine-grained data. Students will conduct a behavioral study with the aim to provide research evidence to overcome the challenges that the real world poses, such as the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on campus life. Potential research ideas include, for example, pedestrian visual attention to maintain social distancing, student attention assessment during on-line versus in-person instruction, and effectiveness of in-vivo versus simulation training.