Welcome to the oaklab (Optimized Algorithms for Knowledge OAK lab)! We are really glad to have you in the lab. I hope you'll learn a lot about psychology, HCI, and learning sciences, develop new skills (coding, research methods, data analysis, writing, giving talks), make new friends, and have a great deal of fun throughout the entire process. We really value diversity and openness in our lab and hope to make it a friendly and productive environment.
This lab manual was inspired by several others and borrows heavily from them (this, this, this, this, this, and this one). It's also a work in progress. If you have ideas about things to add, or what to clarify, talk to me (Paulo Carvalho, the PI) or a lab manager (if the lab currently has one).
When you join the lab, you're expected to read this manual. You're also highly encouraged to read it while deciding if you want to join the lab in the first place. You should always feel free to talk to Paulo to clarify anything in the lab manual and let him know if he isn't following through on some of his promises! This lab manual is intended to be a starting point for a positive mentor-mentee and lab experience — but, ultimately, positive experiences will also require active investment in, and refinement of, our one-on-one interactions over time.
This lab manual is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution - NonCommercial 4.0 International License. If you're a PI or a trainee in a different lab and want to write your own lab manual, feel free to take inspiration from this one (and cite us!).
The mission of our lab is to produce work that truly advances the fields of HCI, Cognitive Science, and Learning Science, develops novel strategies and devices to improve educational success, and never compromise in quality and scientific integrity. Concurrently, we aim to provide rigorous academic training to scholars who will go on to have impactful careers (in academia, industry, or more broadly).
For new researchers, a helpful thing to keep in mind is that research is fundamentally different from most people's experiences in school. In most undergraduate classes (and many professional training environments), you're usually asked to solve problems with a known solution. You have a syllabus, a textbook, lecture notes, etc., and generally if you use the listed resources and do what you're told, you will succeed. In research, we're ultimately trying to expand the frontiers of human knowledge. Therefore, with research questions, if we (or anyone else) already knew the answer, we would not be studying the question. Don't worry when you don't know the answer to something. That's to be expected, and often times, nobody does! Once you're comfortable with that idea, you can focus on using all the resources around you to figure out the answer.
OAK stands for Optimized Algorithms for Knowledge. This captures in broad strokes most of what we study in the lab: algorithms (artificial or biological), including memory, learning, attention, and motivation, optimized to acquire knowledge. It is also a translation of my last name to English ("carvalho" is the Portuguese word for "oak")! We often call it oaklab for short.
Science is hard. But it's also fun. In oaklab, we want to make sure that everyone experiences a positive, engaging, hostility-free, challenging, and rewarding lab environment. To maintain that environment, we all have to do a few things.