Lizzie Mickiewicz (she/her/hers)

About me

I am a fourth year undergraduate student majoring in neuroscience and psychology at the University of Chicago. I am interested in exploring the influence of cognitive processes on language and vice versa, with a focus on incorporating both naturalistic and experimental measures in my work.

Currently, I am working on my senior thesis project, studying whether the phenomenon of infant phoneme discrimination can accurately be measured using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS). I am also using fNIRS to investigate how the use of gestures may influence children’s learning of math on a project headed by Amanda Seccia, a post-doctoral student in the Environmental Neuroscience Lab and Goldin-Meadow Lab. I am also helping conduct an eye-tracking study interested in what features of spoken language children use to predict turn-taking in conversations.

In previous work, I have annotated child-centric, daylong images to investigate whether the objects children hold throughout the day influence their language acquisition patterns. I have also coded gaze data to further explore the effects of mispronunciation in cross-cultural communities.

Beyond my time at UChicago, I am looking to engage full-time with research in the fields of neuroscience and psychology before applying to graduate school in those areas.

Publications

Casey, K., Elliott, M., Mickiewicz, E., Silva Mandujano, A., Shorter, K., Duquette, M., Bergelson, E., & Casillas, M. (2022). Sticks, leaves, buckets, and bowls: Distributional patterns of children’s at-home object handling in two subsistence societies. In J. Culbertson, A. Perfors, H. Rabagliati & V. Ramenzoni (Eds.), Proceedings of the 44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci 2022) (pp. 927-933). [ms] [gh] [data visualization tool]

Contact

Email: lizmick9@uchicago.edu