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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.
15 years ago
2 comments:
I have an undergraduate degree in psychology and took a course entitled "Animal Behavior". My professor was a researcher who studied monkeys in the wild. Through the course, I found that animal research will often extend across fields to include evolutionary and behavioral psychology, biology resources and any other fields dealing with animals, such as zoology. It was interesting to see that she also cited child development journals, but given that scientists are frequently trying to relate animal behavior to human behavior, it's not as much of a stretch.
Anyways, I think you're on the right track searching the PsyInfo, PsyArticles, and EBSO databases. Reaching out to other databases would be good, especially those that include the popular literature, because evoluationary psychology, psychobiology, and animal behavior is a big research topic right now in the popular magazines and journals.
I found that looking at the CV of a scientist has the best amount of information you could hope for. I know finding my scientist's CV was a breakthrough.
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