Where she's been published and conference exploration

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I went back to EBSCO to review where Laurie Santos has published and some of the publications she cited in her work. I used the basic Academic Search Complete and I limited my search to Academic Journals. I know that she has been included in some popular publications such as Discovery and Smithsonian magazines and these can be some good places for sparking ideas but the more academic journals provide details on research that would be invaluable to someone new to the field. Titles citing Laurie Santos as author include Developmental Science and Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. I decided to expand the search to include psychology databases: PsycINFO, PsychARTICLES and Psychology and Behavioral Science Collection. This only yielded two more publications: Animal Cognition, and Developmental Science. I find that she was listed as editor for a few publications such as Infancy, and Child Development.

Looking back at her web pages this connection to child development is not a surprise. Laurie Santos's list of published works includes entries in such journals as Infancy, Developmental Science, Cognition and Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. On the monkey-lab site her student assistants have short bios, many of whom list an interest in both infant/child cognition and non-human primate cognition. It makes sense that someone who wants to understand the evolution of thought would look for parallels between young humans and non-human primates. It reminds me of documentaries I have seen that compare language use and understanding in chimps that have been taught sign language and young humans.

Other journals that have published Dr. Santos's work are Current Biology and, Journal of Political Economy. This second seems a little unusual until the focus of her more current work is considered. As I stated in an earlier post her most current experiments deal with the economic behavior of non-human primates.

I spent quite a lot of time trying to find mention of Laurie Santos presenting at a conference. Using a Google scholar search I came up with some hits that mention some conferences such as the Bi-Annual Meeting of the International Conference on Infant...(this was cut off and I couldn't access more from the link) and the 21st Annual Boston U. Conference on Language. However, these links were difficult to follow as many led to proprietary sites like Elsiver and JSTOR.

Next I tried just looking for related conferences. This became a little overwhelming. I found a site that was a kind of general listing of academic conferences - Conference Alerts. This site is broken up into disciplines. I don't have much faith in this site. I think the listings are very extensive, there don't seem to be enough. If fact I tried one I know, CAAS, Classical Association of Atlantic States, and it was not listed. I was starting to feel at a loss.

Luckily I went back to Dr. Santos's Yale web page and found a link to her CV. When I tried to access this before I was blocked but I must have be trying from a different page. None of the earlier possible conferences were listed on her CV. So it looks like my time on Google looking for a link between Dr. Santos and conferences was wasted. Dr. Santos also list many lists many events at which she was an invited speaker. There seems to be many symposiums, lecture series and other events in addition to conferences that would be great sources of information and inspiration to anyone interested in the same field of research.

the Clusty experience

Sunday I decided to take Prof. Marsteller's suggestion to visit the Clusty search site. A simple name search yielded some Yale Daily News articles which provided some clues. One article was an profile piece in which Laurie Santos says she hopes to start teaching classes in behavioral biology and evolutionary psychology. The fact that many of her monkey's at Harvard were names after former Yale psychologists; indicating, I'm sure, some of her idols or influences. The article also states the focus of her work as the evolution of human cognition and the mental capabilities of monkeys and other non-human primates. But this I already knew from her web pages.

Another resource uncovered by my Clusty search is Psych Central, a mental health social network. Laurie was quoted in a few articles here. I wonder if she would participate in this type of social network. It seems a little removed from her primary work but may be a source of inspiration.

I also came across an event at which Laurie Santos presented. CoSy, Cognitive Systems for Cognitive Assistants, "meeting of the minds workshop" in Paris '07. This organization seems to be primarily concerned with artificial intelligence. But it appears that Prof. Santos was invited to speak. It seems sometimes information and inspiration finds you!

Although I found some interesting things in the Clusty site I did have to filter out unrelated hits like the hits for another Laurie Santos, the "extreme dream coach". On the other hand it did lead to some things that I might not have found in an EBSCO or other similar database search.

I think I will go back to her published papers to analyze her citations.

beginning my scientist investigation

The scientist I have chosen for my exploration of information seeking behavior is Laurie Santos. She is a psychology professor at Yale University. On her Yale profile page she says "My current work explores what primates understand about physical objects and their motions, how primates spontaneously reason about different kinds of things (foods, artifacts, and animals), and whether or not non-human primates possess precursors to a theory of mind." Some of her more current studies are focused on the economic behavior of capuchin monkeys and lemurs and their similarities to humans, including some of the same illogical choices.

I started my search with a basic EBSCO Academic Search Complete. I wanted to get an idea of Prof. Santos' published writing. Surprisingly one of the things that I found most useful was not an article in scholarly journal but an interview in Discover magazine. In this interview she discusses her background, how she stumbled into psychology as an undergrad through an elective class, who she is working with now and she even mentions an experiment in risk aversion that seems to have inspired her. I had been wondering what led her to focus her experiments on primate economic behavior and in this article she explains how some new monkeys in her research lab were handing their orange peels to the keepers. She realized that they had been previously trained in a token economy. As the orange peels are not real tokens this must have made her wonder about their perception of economy.

I also went into the Yale site and read her profile page. Here she has a link to a personal web page. This in turn led me to her lab-page. Here she has posted short profiles for her graduate assistants and a list of other collaborators. Many of these are professors in related fields such as language and cognition. I think these collaborations would be a great source of information gathering and inspiration.

Next, I will try to find out what type of organizations she may belong to. I feel like I should know how to go about this but right now am at a bit of a loss so I'll probably ask some of the wonderful librarians I work with for some hints and post later.