Lauren Girouard

I’m an experimental psychologist and NSF SPRF Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Harvard University & University of Michigan. I study how 3- to 12- year old children think about and learn from digital information sources like Alexa, Google, ChatGPT, and the internet at large in their lives, homes, and classrooms.

My mentor team consists of Dr. Susan Gelman, Dr. Ying Xu, and Dr. Jenny Radesky. I received my PhD in May 2024 from the University of Louisville in Louisville, Kentucky under the mentorship of Dr. Judith Danovitch. I joined the University of Michigan as an NIH T32 Training Grant Postdoctoral Fellow. I also received a Masters of Science in Experimental Psychology from U of L in 2021.

I am primarily interested in how children use digital agents like ChatGPT, Alexa, Google, and the Internet as novel scaffolding tools for their thinking and learning. My interests center on exploring when and why children turn to technology to learn new information as opposed to other informants like teachers or peers.

When not engaging in research, I am passionate about pedagogy and have spent the last few years garnering skills in teaching graduate levels statistics, including multivariate methods. A colleague and I have received a SIPS Commendation for our work simulating datasets from real world DEI based articles for statistics classrooms. Beyond this, I have been active in service to the academic community through APA’s Science Student Council and Graduate Student Teaching Assistant Steering Committee, and science communication through ComSciCon, a national science communication conference for and by graduate students, and CogBites, a blog devoted to translating cognition research for larger audiences. I am also the co-founder of the Louisville Chapter of R-Ladies!​

Before my time at U of L and UMich, I received a Masters of Arts in Drama Therapy from New York University and a Bachelors of Science in Neuroscience and a Bachelor of Arts in Theatre from Furman University in Greenville, SC.