Core Lab At Northeastern University

In the CORE lab, we explore how people organize and use their knowledge of the world. We examine the basic cognitive processes of categorization, reasoning, and conceptual development, with an eye towards applications in education, social relations, and other areas. In this exploration, we ask questions like: how do we as humans intuitively organize what we know? How do we use that organization to make guesses about what we do not know? How does intuitive knowledge and conceptual structure interact with formal knowledge in education? We conceptualize intuitive knowledge in terms of cognitive construals: informal, possibly even implicit, ways of thinking about the world. These might be a set of assumptions, a type of explanation, or a predisposition to a particular type of reasoning.