Research Experience Opportunities

2601: Babies’ Language Development

This research project investigates early language development in babies. Working on this project will involve: recruitment of participants, guided experiment design and implementation, running experiments, codification of the data obtained from experiments, guided result analysis. You will be fully trained in using the eye tracker, administering the experiment, and in the necessary data analysis techniques.

Student level: Open to undergraduate or MSc students 

Duration: at least 6 months 

Start date: TBC 

Responsible researcher: Dr Nayeli Gonzalez-Gomez

BabyLab Website:  http://psych.brookes.ac.uk/babylab/

2602 Title: Young children’s social cognition and cognitive and metacognitive monitoring 

We have multiple on-going projects, which investigate preschool- and school-aged children’s understanding of people, learning, and teaching, and underlying mechanisms such as metacognitive monitoring and control. 

You will be working closely with Dr. Sunae Kim. The main tasks include family recruitment, testing children in schools or in the lab, and data entry. Appropriate training for all phases of these tasks will be provided. If you are interested in becoming more deeply involved in the projects, by conducting preliminary data analyses and contributing to manuscript drafts, a long-term commitment (at least one year) would be required. If your performance is satisfactory, you will be included as a co-author on a published paper. Many of Dr. Kim’s papers feature student (both undergraduate and graduate level) co-authors. 

Requirements: highly-motivated, detail-oriented, and reliable. No prior research experiences required. 

Student level: undergraduates or MSc Brookes students 

Duration: at least 6 months 

Start date: Negotiable 

Responsible researcher: Dr Sunae Kim 

2503: Creativity & imagination tasks

This research project involves coding the results of (1) a newly developed creativity task and (2) an imagination task. Working on this project will involve: codification of the creativity and imagination data obtained from experiments and, if desirable, insights into result analysis. “You will be trained in coding methodology, developing transferable research skills that will strengthen your CV and that you can apply in your own research.”

Student level: Open to undergraduate or MSc students

Duration: at least 3 months

Start date: Negotiable

Responsible researcher: Dr Valerie van Mulukom

2604:OxBAR-Lab Psychology Research Experiene Scheme

Interested in gaining hands-on research experience in our brand new BAR-LAB?

OxBAR-Lab is recruiting a small number of Psychology students to support ongoing research projects during the 2026/2027 academic year.

 Students will initially assist with tasks such as literature searching, data preparation, and research administration before receiving training to support data collection in the lab and other research activities where appropriate.

This is an opportunity to develop research skills, gain experience of working within an active research group, and contribute to real-world projects.

Please note: participation requires a reliable commitment over the academic year. We are looking for students who can contribute consistently and are willing to engage with training and research activities.

To apply, complete the PRES form and please send to edavies@brookes.ac.uk:

• A short expression of interest (maximum 250 words)

• A current CV

2605: What Do People Believe Is Sacred? Coding Cross-Cultural Free-List Data

Are sacred values a universal feature of human psychology, or are they shaped by culture? This project tackles that question using free-listing, a method where participants list, in their own words, everything that comes to mind in response to a prompt. Here, the prompt is “What do you believe to be sacred?” The dataset comes from includes responses from over 11,000 people across 15 populations, 10 language groups, and 5 religious traditions, making it one of the largest bottom-up datasets on the sacred.

What’s involved: Cleaning and standardising responses (correcting spelling, merging synonyms, deciding how to handle ambiguous answers), applying a coding scheme to sort responses into meaningful categories, and checking agreement with other coders. Your human coding will also help validate a pipeline that uses large language models to code free-list data at scale, so you’ll gain experience at the intersection of qualitative coding and computational methods. Full training is provided. Students involved in this task will be included as authors on any/all journal articles that come from the work. 

Requirements: Detail-oriented, reliable, and comfortable working independently once trained. No prior research experience or knowledge of religion is needed but an interest in these topics and/or interest in cultural psychology is ideal. Students who speak one or more or any of the following languages actively encouraged to apply (Arabic, Spanish, Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian, Korean, Filipino/Tagalog, Brazilian Portuguese, Thai, Urdu, Chinese). 

Student level: Open to undergraduate or MSc students

Duration: 2-3 months (or longer)

Start date: January/February 2027 Responsible researcher: Dr Adam Baimel