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| Posted 10.16.07 |
New Assistant Professor Expert on Space, Number Representations
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Anna Shusterman has
joined the Department of Psychology as an assistant professor of psychology.
This semester she is teaching PSYCH110, "Issues in Contemporary Psychology:
What Makes Us Human?”
Shusterman’s research interests are on the structure and development of
mental representations, interactions between language and cognitive
development, and representations of space and number.
She comes to Wesleyan from Harvard University, where she was a postdoctoral
fellow in the Laboratory for Developmental Studies.
“Wesleyan has provided me with everything I need to do my research,
including a beautiful new child development laboratory,” she says. “I also
appreciate that Wesleyan values both research and teaching, which is
important to me and very hard to find at many institutions.”
Shusterman received a bachelor of science in neuroscience from Brown
University in 1998, and a Ph.D in developmental psychology from Harvard
University in 2006.
At Harvard, she was the recipient of the National Science Foundation
Graduate Student Research Fellowship between 2003-06; the McMaster
Restricted Funds Grant in 2006 for her project “Spatial language and
cognition in Nicaraguan Sign Language”; the Mind/Brain/Behavior Graduate
Student Grant in 2005; the Stimson Restricted Funds Grant in 2005 for her
project “The Comprehensive Survey on Trichotillomania."
Shusterman is an active member in the Cognitive Development Society and
Society for Research on Child Development; an Ad hoc reviewer for Cognition;
a past organizer for The Diversity of Children’s Spatial Representations
symposium and at the 4th Biennial Meeting of the Cognitive Development Society;
and co-founder of the Harvard-MIT Philosophy & Experimental Psychology
Reading Group.
She is the co-author of several articles, including “Reorientation and
landmark-guided search in children: Evidence for two systems,” published in
Psychological Science in 2006; and “Language and the development of
spatial reasoning,” published in The Structure of the Innate Mind by
Oxford University Press in 2005. She also has several articles under revision
or in preparation.
She has presented at more than a dozen conferences, most recently at the
Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research on Child Development March 29
in Boston, Mass. She will speak on “Does spatial language guide spatial
representation? Evidence from Nicaraguan Sign Language” during the Fifth
Biennial Meeting of the Cognitive Development Society, Santa Fe, N.M. this
year.
In addition to teaching, Shusterman has worked as a research supervisor and
reading/research advisor for undergraduates from Wesleyan, Harvard, and
other institutions participating in cognitive development research for
work-study, Research Methods, Advanced Methods, Honors thesis projects, and
summer internship program since 2002.
The Wesleyan students, she says, are a pleasure to be around, work with and
teach.
“I came in with high expectations of the students, and my expectations are
exceeded every day in new and surprising ways,” she says.
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Olivia Bartlett, The Wesleyan Connection
editor |
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