The University of Chicago
Department of Psychology
5848 South University Avenue
Chicago, IL, 60637
Eliza Congdon is working with Dr. Susan Levine as a doctoral student in Developmental Psychology at the University of Chicago. She graduated from Brown University in 2008 with honors in Neuroscience. Prior to her doctoral studies, Eliza was a research assistant at the Laboratories of Cognitive Neuroscience at Children's Hospital Boston under Dr. Charles A. Nelson. Through this experience, she completed her senior honors thesis: a study of the effects of early iron deficiency on the neural correlates of recognition memory in school-aged children from Chile. She also worked on several electrophysiological studies which explored the development of face processing in infants and young children.
Eliza currently studies individual differences in mathematical strategies in elementary school children and how those strategies interact with various training interventions. More specifically, she explores the relative efficacy of abstract teaching tools (such as language and gesture) versus more traditional concrete instructional tools (mathematical manipulatives). She is also interested in gesture as a learning tool more broadly, and it's ability to provide an index of a child's current level of understanding of a given mathematical concept. Finally, Eliza is interested in how early parental input affects children's later outcomes within the domain of both numerical and spatial understanding.