Children’s Drawings
Drawings can be a helpful tool for evaluating children’s cognitive functioning.
In our lab, we explore factors that influence the nature of children’s drawings and how drawings might be used more effectively in assessments of children’s cognitive and motor capabilities.
Children’s Understanding about Death
We explore how children reason about different aspects of death. Some aspects we look at include:
- universality (all living things die)
- finality (death is irreversible)
- nonfunctionality (all biological and psychological processes cease at death)
- causality (death can occur for many reasons)
- noncorporeal continuity (belief that someone continues to exist in some form after death).
We are interested in how biological and religious beliefs coexist. For this research, we conduct child-parent interviews in the United States and Mexico, where beliefs about death differ in interesting ways.