Research Opportunities

Research at Brooklyn College

More than a dozen active laboratories in the department focus on topics such as creativity and cognition in the arts, prejudice and discrimination, cognition in invertebrates (e.g. octopus), the role of inequality in cognitive development, the neurobiological bases of psychopathic behavior, metamemory (knowledge of one's own memory), the development of children and adolescents' career goals, moral decision-making, the neurobehavioral mechanisms of associative learning, and many more.

All labs are well equipped, and many have attracted funding from NSF, NIH, NASA, DARPA, and other organizations. Several faculty members have appointments and working collaborations with research labs in city hospitals and medical schools with access to frontier technologies such as fMRI.

Learn more about faculty research specializations.

Student Research Opportunities

There are several different ways for students to get involved with research. Independent Reading (PSYC 7791/7792) and Independent Research (PSYC 7795/7796) allow students to get course credit for conducting research with a faculty mentor. To get the full experience of the research process—from formulating a research question, to collecting the data and interpreting the results—students are encouraged to conduct a thesis project. More informally, students can volunteer in different research labs or attend lab meetings. The department also runs a regular colloquium series in which professors from different universities visit Brooklyn College to talk about their research. Students in the M.A. program are invited to attend these talks and meet with the speakers.

Faculty Research Areas

Comparative/Animal/Bio/Neuroscience

computational neuroscience; behavioral neuroscience; integration of neural populations in cognitive function; neural networks; basic behavioral sciences
animal behavior; pavlovian mechanisms; biomimetic and cognitive robotics
biopsychology of appetite; food preferences, obesity in humans and laboratory animals; physiology of feeding

Applied/Clinical/Neuroscience

clinical neuropsychology;cognitive neuroscience; neurohormones; human behavior genetics
abnormal psychology; neurodevelopment of psychopathology, cognitive/neuropsychological functioning, and early risk factors in the development of psychopathology
cognitive changes associated with early stages of dementia; psychological dysfunction in neuro-degenerative disease; cognitive remediation
biological basis of antisocial behavior

Cognitive

associative learning; learning in food preferences; cognitive foundations of complex learning; implicit learning; knowledge acquisition in communication; extinction
cognitive development; language development
thinking; language; memory; hypermnesia; metacognition
motivation; cognitive and motivational interactions; psychodynamic aspects of cognition, subliminal processes, defense mechanisms
cognitive studies of creativity, expertise in visual arts
social cognition
neural mechanisms of associative memory
memory and attention in skilled performance

Basic Sensory Processes

sensory systems, psychophysics
vision, color vision; marine chemical senses and olfaction; visual psychophysiology
sensory/perceptual development in infants; aging and vision, life-span changes
spatial-temporal contrast sensitivity; stereopsis

Personality/Social-organizational

social psychology; social cognition, social identification, self-concept, prejudice and stereotyping; attitudinal ambivalence; sex differences; social interaction;
communication; groups research, transactive knowledge systems
industrial and organizational psychology, organizational psychology
evolutionary psychology; mate selection; human mating
personality; interpretation of dreams and jokes