Author: Marina Bazhydai

Marina and Dr Elena Altmann completed a pilot research project with young people in KS3&4 who went on educational trips as part of their extra curriculum learning. The study was commissioned by the Next Generation Travel. We found promising evidence for the positive effect of educational trips as alternative learning environments on young people’s curiosity, sense of wonder and desire to learn. Read more about the study here.

Marina and Mathilde co-created and presented the Imagination Cave – a VR experience public engagement exhibit presented at the Lancaster Music Festival in collaboration with the ISS Innovation Hub. Over 50 members of the public visited the exhibit during the event.

The experience was inspired by research on curiosity, imagination and creativity, in particular during engagement with the arts.

We invited people to listen to a piece of music and then describe an image inspired by that music. This empowered AI to create personalised digital artworks based on their creative associations. Here are a few examples:

Imagination Cave VR simulation is an innovative tool that will enable psychological lab-based research into several fascinating cognitive processes in children and adults, such as imagination, curiosity, wonder, insight, and creativity. Primarily, we aim to use it as a way to put people in a state of wonder or to spark their curiosity, then ask them to use their imagination, and finally measure their creativity afterwards, along with their assessment of AI-generated artworks. This will allow us to gain empirical evidence for the proposed link between curiosity, wonder and creativity, a topic currently under-investigated in psychological research. The tool also allows drawing connections between different art forms, such as music, visual and literary arts, so that we can investigate how these may uniquely relate to these psychological processes. Finally, with the inclusion of the AI-generated artwork, this tool will be uniquely positioned to study human creativity and imagination in the context of generative AI creative outputs.

Marina co-authors the second edition of the Student’s Guide to Developmental Psychology textbook designed for undergraduate psychology students.

Marina presented the work from the Wonder in the Classrooms project investigating the links between curiosity, wonder and creativity in school children at the annual Marconi Institute for Creativity conference held in Sardinia, Italy.

Didar and Marina presented at the Cultural Evolution Society conference held this year in Durham, UK. The conference attracts researchers across psychology, animal studies, anthropology, archaeology, economics and sociology fields – all interested in understanding the phenomenon of culture and cultural transmission.

Marina and Didar presented their work on children’s information transmission in infants, toddlers and middle school children.

We are off to a great start of the 5- year project to develop a new battery of measures of curiosity for school children! The project is run by Marina as PI and Dr Lily FitzGibbon of Stirling University as Co-I, with Dr Mathilde Prenevost leading the work as a postdoctoral researcher.

This project is funded by the Leverhulme Trust Research Project Grant and it aims to synthesize the theoretical and methodological approaches to curiosity in childhood and use this integrative perspective to systematically address the paucity and heterogeneity of psychological measurements of curiosity in school age (7-11 year old) children. The resulting validated multidimensional assessment battery will be made available for use by researchers and educators. Longitudinal studies will be undertaken to investigate the relationship between different facets of curiosity with children’s academic achievement and psychological well-being outcomes.

The aims and aspirations of the project are summarised in this news article.

The Lancaster Evaluation Group (LEG) are a cross-institutional and interdisciplinary team of researchers and practitioners based at Lancaster University, who have come together through a common interest in evaluative practice https://lancasterevaluationgroup.uk/. Marina co-founded the group with the kick-off Cross-Faculty Catalyst fund awarded by Lancaster University to help develop rigorous evaluation tools, in particular for the education section. The group has led a series of workshops and seminars which can be accessed by joining the team: https://lancasterevaluationgroup.uk/leg-blog

Congratulations to Malcolm on his first authored publication from his PhD – a completed Registered Report now available at the Royal Society Open Science! It’s title is: Does implicit mentalizing involve the representation of others’ mental state content? Examining domain-specificity with an adapted Joint Simon task. 

Marina co-authored two publications as part of the ManyManys network aiming to develop cross-species cognitive tasks and approaches to better understand cognitive development. The papers are available here: Challenges and Promises of Big Team Comparative Cognition and Comparative Cognition Needs Big Team Science: How Large-Scale Collaborations Will Unlock the Future of the Field.

Marina, Elena and Didar presented at the International Congress of Infant Studies held in Glasgow this year. Elena and Didar presented several posters on their research from PhD work. Elena and Marina also presented two research studies on infant curiosity in the organised symposium: In the driver’s seat of development.