For Prospective Graduate Students

Emerging Minds Lab meeting, featuring Paw-Assistant, Homer

The Emerging Minds Lab is recruiting a new PhD student for the 2024-2025 application cycle

Successful PhD applicants to the Emerging Minds Lab have (1) prior experience conducting experimental research with infants and/or young children in the field of cognitive development and (2) an interest in research topics that align with the lab’s research focus (e.g. curiosity, persistence, decision-making, social cognition, more below).

If you have questions about applying to do graduate work in the lab, please direct them to Dr. Kelsey Lucca (klucca@asu.edu). Apply here!

You can take a virtual tour of our lab here, and watch ASU’s Developmental Psychology 2022 prospective student webinar here.

Current Lab Research Directions
We are looking for PhD students who share research interests with the lab. A large focus of current lab research is an NSF-funded project on the development of curiosity during infancy and early childhood. You can learn more about this line of research here. Our lab also has a number of other active lines of research on early cognitive development, including: social cognition, communication, problem solving, persistence, reasoning, and decision making. You can learn more about these projects on our research page and read our most recent representative publications here.

Across all our studies, we are interested in how environmental factors such as socialization practices, culture, and parenting behaviors impact learning and development. To conduct our research, we use a variety of methodological approaches (e.g. behavioral experiments, naturalistic observations, looking-based paradigms) across a range of ages (five months – adulthood). We conduct our research in close collaboration with international partners in Italy, Turkey, Iceland, China, Hungary, France, UK, Canada, Israel, and New Zealand.

PhD students from the Emerging Minds Lab & ASU’s Learning and Development Lab at ICIS 2022 in Ottawa, Canada

Lab Values
We believe that the diversity that each person brings to our research team is both a resource and a strength, and we strongly encourage students from underrepresented backgrounds to apply to work in our lab. Please see our About Us page for more information about our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Lab Partnerships and Community Connections
The Emerging Minds Lab is a part of the Early Childhood Cognition Research Group, a group of ASU developmental psychology labs that share an interest in how infants and children learn, communicate, and understand their environment. We also conduct research in partnership with the Child Study Lab, a preschool (for 15 months- 5 years) right inside the ASU Psychology Building -- just a few doors down from our lab.

The Emerging Minds Lab cultivates relationships within the scientific community as well as our local community. We are committed to an open science framework, meaning we strive to make our research accessible and transparent to other scientists and community members. Our team is actively involved in the ManyBabies project, a collaborative project for replication and best practices in developmental psychology research. We are currently helping lead the ManyBabies4 project, a large-scale, international research project examining infants’ early social evaluations.

Here in Arizona, the Emerging Minds Lab partners with local community members to get the public engaged in our research and science more broadly. For example, we often hold scientific outreach events for Arizona families at public libraries and science museums across the Phoenix metropolitan area. We also have a weekly “Living Lab” installation at the Children’s Museum of Phoenix, where researchers interact with family and conduct data collection with young children. Phoenix is one of the fastest growing cities in the United States (also one of the sunniest!), with over 1.68 million people from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds.

Instructions and Tips for Applying
More information about the PhD program in Developmental Psychology at ASU can be found here. The following links include more information about the application process, the Psychology Department, and ASU graduate admissions.

Please ensure that you follow the instructions for Developmental Psychology listed on the Doctoral Admissions webpage. The GRE is NOT required. The Developmental area has a required Statement of Purpose and an optional cover letter.

The cover letter is an opportunity to expand on points from your Statement of Purpose and/or if you have any other information you would like to share with us!
Click here for our tips for Writing a Statement of Purpose for a Developmental Psychology PhD Program
ASU’s Psychology Department put together this fantastic video on crafting a Statement of Purpose.
Watch the video below to learn more about the Developmental area in our department.

Additional Research Opportunities
If you are looking for more ways to get research experience before applying to graduate school, check out these resources:

A number of labs across the country host paid summer internships with the goal of helping students gain research skills and decide if graduate school is a good fit for them. Psych Research List (created by Meltem Yucel) compiles a list of these programs every year. Some programs are only for students who have not yet graduated, but some accept recent graduates! Psych Research List also maintains a list of postbac research assistant jobs in psychology labs.