Graduate Student Accomplishments, Awards, and Publications
The Georgetown University graduate program in Developmental Science strongly encourages its students to pursue opportunities for professional development. The graduate students in the Psychology department are actively involved in grant writing, teaching, presenting, and collaborating both within and outside the department. Their work has been presented at the discipline's leading conferences and published in premier journals. Below is a sample of professional accomplishments achieved by current graduate students in the program.
Selected Publications
Bennett, I.J., Madden, D.J., Vaidya, C.J., Howard, J.H., Jr., Howard, D.V. (In Press). Age-related differences in multiple measures of white matter integrity: A diffusion tensor imaging study of healthy aging. Human Brain Mapping.
Lauricella, A., Barr, R., Calvert, S., (in press). Emerging Computer Skills: Influences of Young Children's Executive Functioning Abilities and Parental Scaffolding Techniques. Journal of Children and Media.
Tenney, E.R., Cleary, H.M.D., & Spellman, B.A. (in press). Unpacking the doubt in “beyond a reasonable doubt”: plausible alternative stories increase Not Guilty verdicts. Basic and Applied Social Psychology.
Phillips, D. A., Gormley, W. T., & Lowenstein, A. E. (in press). Inside the pre-kindergarten door: Classroom climate and instructional time allocation in Tulsa’s pre-K programs. Early Childhood Research Quarterly.
Zack, E., Barr, R., Gerhardstein, P., Dickerson, K., & Meltzoff, A. N. (in press). Infant imitation from television using novel touch-screen technology. British Journal of Developmental Psychology.
Shelton, J.A., Elliott, E.M., Eaves, S.D., & Exner, A.L. (2009). The cognitive response to a ringing phone. Journal of Environmental Psychology. doi:10.1016/j.jenvp.2009.03.
Vaidya, C. J.& Stollstorff, M. (2008). Cognitive Neuroscience of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder: Current Status and Working Hypotheses. Developmental Disabilities Research Reviews, 14, 261-267. 
Woolard, J. L., Cleary, H. M. D., Harvell, S. A. S., & Chen, R. (2008). Examining adolescents' and their parents' conceptual and practical knowledge of police interrogation: a family dyad approach. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 37, 685-698.
Anton, S.D., Exner, A., Newton, R. L. (2008). Intentions are not sufficient to change behavior: strategies that promote behavior change and healthy weight management. In F. Columbus (Ed.), New Perspectives on Knowledge, Attitudes and Practices in Health. New York: Nova Science Publishers, Inc.
Lee, N. (in press). Perpetuating hierarchies: Lay-women's discursive practices in the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. Culture & Psychology.
Bennett, I. J., Howard, J. H., & Howard, D. V. (2007). Age-related differences in implicit learning of subtle third-order sequential structure. Journal of Gerontology, 62B, 98-103.
Lowenstein, A. E. (2007). Professional development. In R. S. New & M. Cochran (Eds.), Early childhood education: An international encyclopedia (Vol. 3, pp. 658-662). Westport, CT: Praeger.
Selected Conference Posters and Presentations
Exner, A. (2009, October). In-school physical education: Effect on body mass index and academic performance among U.S. adolescents. Poster presented at the annual scientific meeting of the Obesity Society, Washington, D.C.
Lowenstein, A. E., Phillips, D. A., & Gormley, W. T. (2009, April). Fostering the socio-emotional adjustment of low-income children: The effects of universal pre-K and Head Start in Oklahoma. Paper presented at the biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Denver, CO.
Lowenstein, A. E. (2009, April). Classroom and teacher predictors of low-income children’s socio-emotional adjustment in pre-kindergarten and Head Start. Poster presented at the biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Denver, CO.
Exner, A., Papatheodorou, G., Baker, C.M., Verdaguer, A., Hluchan, C.M., & Calvert, S.L. (2009, April). Solitary versus social gross motor videogame play: Energy expenditure among low-income African American adolescents. Paper presented at the biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Denver, CO.
Brito, N., Brunick, K., & Vishton, P.M. (2009, April). How object properties influence the frequency of scale errors during object-directed reaching. Poster presented at the biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Denver, CO.Bennett, I. J., Simon, J. R., Madden, D. J., Vaidya, C. J., Howard, J. H. & Howard, D. V. (2009, March). A Combined DTI and fMRI Analysis of the Neural Correlates of Implicit Probabilistic Sequence Learning. Poster session
Cleary, H.M.D., Woolard, J.L., Jarvis, J. (2009, March). An observational study of police-juvenile dynamics in custodial interrogations. Paper presented at the annual conference of the American Criminal Justice Society, Boston, MA.
Woolard, J.L., & Cleary, H.M.D. (2009, March). Parent and youth views on interrogation choices: age differences in consistency and resolution of disagreements. In J.L. Woolard (chair), Police interrogation of vulnerable suspects. Paper presented at the annual conference of the American Psychology-Law Society, San Antonio, TX.
Simon, J. R., Murphy, E. R., Vaidya, C. J., Howard, J. H. & Howard, D. V. (2009, March). Functional connectivity of implicit probabilistic sequence learning in aging. . Poster session presented at the 16th annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, San Francisco, CA.
Simon, J. R., Barnes, K. A., Vaidya, C. J., Howard, J. H. & Howard, D. V. (2009, March). Neural basis of probabilistic sequence learning in aging: An fMRI study. Poster session presented at the 38th annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, Washington, DC.
Stollstorff, M., Bean, S.E., Anderson, L., Vaidya, C.J. (January, 2009). Effect of dopamine regulating genes (DAT1 & COMT) on logical reasoning with emotional content. Poster presented at the Conference on Organization of Prefrontal Cortex for Executive Function, Boulder, CO.Lowenstein, A. E. (2008, July). Understanding the pre-K movement: the anatomy of an advocacy campaign. Paper presented at the First National Research Conference on Child and Family Programs and Policy, Bridgewater, MA.
Corrington, M., & Phillips, D. (2008, July). Understanding gender differences in the effects of the Tulsa Pre-K Program on school readiness. Paper Presented at the First National Research Conference on Child and Family Programs and Policy, Bridgewater, MA.
Simon, J. R., Barnes, K. A., Vaidya, C. J., Howard, J. H., & Howard, D. V. (2008, April). Neural basis of implicit sequence learning in a probabilistic Triplets Learning Task. Poster session presented at the 15th annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, San Francisco, CA.
Simon, J. R., Howard, J. H., Frank, M. J., & Howard, D. V. (2008, April). Adult age differences in positive versus negative feedback learning in Probabilistic Selection. Poster session presented at the 12th biennial meeting of the Cognitive Aging Conference, Atlanta, GA.
Zack, E., Barr, R., Shuck, L., Sperle, E., Shroff, G., Dickerson, K., Miller, S. Gerhardstein, P., & Meltzoff, A. N. (2008, March). Infants fail at a transfer of learning task from 2D to 3D and 3D to 2D. Poster presented at the International Conference on Infant Studies, Vancouver, Canada.
Zack, E., Fidler, A., Carr, C., Lee. J., Reyes, J., & Barr, R (2008, March). Television viewing patterns in 6- and 9-month-olds: The role of infant-parent interactions and joint attention. Poster presented at the International Conference on Infant Studies, Vancouver, Canada.
Daglis, H., Woolard, J. L., & Harvell, S.S. (2008, March). Police interviewing and interrogation of juvenile suspects in custodial and non-custodial settings. In J. L. Woolard (chair), A developmental approach to juvenile interrogation: perspectives from parents, cops, kids, and prosecutors. Paper presented at the biennial meeting of the American Psychology-Law Society, Jacksonville, FL.
Graduate Student Awards/Fellowships
Alexis Lauricella was awarded the 2009 Fred Rogers Memorial Scholarship Award.Ilana Bennett was awarded an NRSA Predoctoral Fellowship from the National Institute on Aging which will support her during her final two years of study. The title of her grant is "Aging, implicit learning, and white matter integrity."
Devon Brost Oskvig (2007) and Melanie Stollstorff (2008) were awarded Center for Brain Based Cognition Graduate Student Seed Grants to promote cross-campus, interdisciplinary research.
Amanda Exner was selected as one of five University Fellows in 2007. She also received the Omicron Delta Kappa Foundation Scholarship to fund her graduate studies.
Amy Lowenstein was awarded a two-year Head Start Graduate Student Research Grant by the Administration for Children and Families in September 2007. The grant will support her dissertation research on the effects of the universal pre-kindergarten and Head Start programs in Oklahoma on low-income children’s socio-emotional adjustment.
Elizabeth Zack was awarded a 2009 Elizabeth Munsterberg Koppitz Fellowship from the American Psychological Foundation. The fellowship promotes the advancement of knowledge and learning in the field of child psychology and will support her during her dissertation year. The title of her grant is “Social factors and infant learning from media.”
Graduate Student Conference Travel Grants*
- 2009- Amy Lowenstein (SRCD), Alexis Lauricella (International Communication Association Conference)
- 2008 - Elizabeth Zack, Mary Corrington, Devon Brost Oskvig, Hayley Daglis Cleary
- 2007 - Kelly Barnes, Ilana Bennett, Elizabeth Zack, Hayley Daglis Cleary, Amy Lowenstein, Melanie Stollstorff
- 2006- Melanie Stollstorff
Undergraduate Seminars Taught by Fourth-Year Graduate Students
Adolescent Development and Law (Samantha Harvell)Experimental Approaches to Understanding the Mind (Kelly Barnes)
The Aging Mind and Brain (Ilana Bennett)
Culture, Mind, and Language (Naomi Lee)
Seminar in Neuroscience (Devon Brost Oskvig)
Infancy (Elizabeth Zack)
Juvenile Justice and Violence (Hayley Daglis Cleary)
Contemporary Issues in Early Care and Education (Amy Lowenstein)
Children and Technology (Alexis Lauricella)
