• BrainWorx

BrainWorx: A Summer Experience at Laurier

Welcome to BrainWorx!

Offered through the Department of Psychology at Laurier, BrainWorx invites families to participate in experimental and training studies each summer. Children will participate in studies, learn how their minds develop and engage in a wide variety of crafts, games, sports and other science-related activities -- it's summer camp with a brainy twist!

What are the studies?

All studies have received full ethical approval. A brief sample of studies are below:

1. Repeated-event memory: Children participate in Ontario curriculum-based activities on four different days. They are interviewed on the fifth day to see if when they confuse activities from different days and whether we can help them distinguish between the different days.
2. The Easy-Hard Study: Children participate once. They watch people perform simple actions and later have to remember who did what action. We are interested in finding out which comparisons they find easy and which they find hard.
3. Language: Children will take part in vocabulary training sessions each day based around a particular topic. Later, they will be given language tests to see whether the training works.
4. Math study: Children will be given two tasks -- one to assess their mathematical development and one to find out about gender stereotypes related to math.

After each study, your child will learn what the purpose of each study was discuss how their "brain works" with the researchers. Each day, a "What I Learned About my Brain" book will come home for parents/guardians to review (in addition to other crafts, etc.).

Who are the BrainWorx staff?

The staff from Laurier's Child Memory Lab will be running BrainWorx. These people are highly trained, qualified individuals who have all had experience working with children.