Skip to main content
ScIU Indiana University Bloomington
Tongyao Zhang: I'm a PhD student in developmental psychology at IU. I'm interested in how people (especially children) get to learn math and science knowledge. I'm personally interested in whether my cat is able to understand how many meals she has already had for today.

Entries by Tongyao Zhang

Why do people look like their names?

Posted by

[Many artistic shapes of human faces.]

There must be times when you have just met a person who introduced herself as “Susan,” and you think to yourself: “Ha! I knew she was ‘Susan!’” You might think that this feeling of being right is illusory. But in fact, you might not be blind-guessing – at least you were not surprised by her name. Let’s take another example.  Look at the man’s face below – most people may feel surprised if his name turns out to be “Bob,” but are less surprised if he is “Andy” or “Timothy”…

Pink for girls…?

Posted by

[Pink baby clothes and pink baby shoes.]

We’ve all seen it before: little girls dressed head to toe in pink, surrounded by dolls, glitter, and unicorns. It seems like a natural inclination for girls to dress pink all over. I myself, as a girl, favored cold colors all the time, and my mother even wondered if there was something wrong with me. It sounded like I was not qualified to be a girl. Does a girl have to like pink? This question haunted me all the way through my childhood…

Love math, but don’t care too much

Posted by

[A child playing with number toys on a table.]

As part of my job as a researcher and graduate student in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, I invite parents and children to play math games in our lab. As I lead parents and children through studies about how children learn, I’ve seen very different attitudes in parents towards math. Some parents would happily talk about numbers and inferences in their daily interactions, and they make a lot of attempts to start a conversation about math…

People get “brain drain” when smartphones merely exist in room

Posted by

[A person typing on the laptop with one hand while tapping the smartphone with the other hand.]

Have you – at least for a moment – ever imagined throwing your smartphone out the window, especially when you are trying to focus on your work? Now you might have a justification for your impulse. Behavioral scientists recently found that if your smartphone is merely present in your room, and even if you are not consciously thinking of it, you may still be distracted…

College of Arts + Sciences

Are you a graduate student at IUB? Would you like to write for ScIU? Email sciucomm@iu.edu