Psychology Faculty

Sara Cordes

Professor

Photo of Sara Cordes

Sara Cordes

Ph.D.

Contact

McGuinn Hall 345

Telephone: 617-552-4112

Email: sara.cordes@bc.edu

Education

  • Ph.D., Rutgers University

Courses

PSYC2260 Developmental Psychology

PSYC3368 Infancy

PSYC5560 Advanced Topics in Developmental Psychology

Research Interests

Infant, child, and adult cognition. Preverbal and verbal representations of number, space, and time. Children's early counting acquisition and understanding of mathematical concepts. Music cognition and perception. Psychophysics of quantity perception. Learning throughout the lifespan. Influences of language and context on learning, discrimination, and decision-making.

Personal Website Curriculum Vitae

Department

Psychology

Profile

Sara Cordes' research is centered upon understanding how it is that infants, children, and adults keep track of quantity—that is, how they attend to, represent, and process number, time, and amount (e.g. volume, surface area). This research is based upon the assumptions that humans, throughout the life-span, as well as non-human animals, learn about the world through tracking these quantities in their environment and that these representations of quantity also serve as the basis for later, verbal and symbolic representations of number (e.g., verbal counting). Research questions revolve around understanding exactly how infant representations of number and other quantities map to later mathematics competence and factors that may contribute to increased precision in representing quantity. In addition, other research investigates how numerical competence and fluency in early childhood affect decision making in probabilistic (gambling) tasks.

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