Associate Professor
Psychology Department
Telephone: 617-552-4112
Email: sara.cordes@bc.edu
Infant, Child, and Adult Cognition
Children's Early听Understanding of Mathematical Concepts
Music Cognition and Perception
Learning Throughout the Lifespan
Influences of Language and Context on Learning, Discrimination, and Decision-Making
Early Education
Children's Understanding of Fairness
Sara Cordes' research is centered upon understanding how infants, children, and adults keep track of numbers, time, and other quantities, and how these quantitative abilities relate to more formal mathematical abilities. She is interested in how early experiences may influence later mathematical abilities and attitudes towards mathematics, as well as how early numerical abilities may intersect with prosocial development. Additional areas of interest are infant and child cognitive development; math learning; influences of language and context on learning; the influence of emotion on quantitative processing; rational number understanding (fractions, decimals) and its relationship to algebraic competence; and mathematics education. Dr. Cordes has been co-author to a over 30 journal publications, among them: 鈥淔ewer Things Lasting Longer: The Effects of Emotional Stimuli on Quantity Judgments鈥 (Psychological Science);听 鈥淭he Influence of Perceptual Variability on Preschoolers鈥 Understanding of Cardinality鈥 (Journal of Cognition and Development); 鈥淭he Development of Area Discrimination and its Implications for Number Representation in Infancy鈥 (Developmental Science); 鈥淏eing Sticker Rich: Children鈥檚 Propensity To Give In Response to Increased Need and Resources (PLOS One); 鈥淪ignal Clarity: An Account of the Variability in Infant Quantity Discrimination Tasks鈥 (Developmental Science);听鈥淐omparing Fractions, Decimals, and Whole Numbers: Rational Number Understanding in Adults (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance); 鈥淣umerical Cognition Explains Age-Related Changes in Third-Party Fairness鈥 (Developmental Psychology); and 鈥淐rossing the Divide: Infants Discriminate Small From Large Numerosities鈥 (Developmental Psychology)
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