Hello! Welcome to my website, I am Tim McCall. I am currently a student at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana majoring in Psychology with minors in Social Sciences in Medicine and Biology. I will graduate in May 2009 and hope to continue my education by pursuing a Ph.D. in social psychology.

I first became increasingly interested in research when I joined a research team studying early verb learning in children.  The research was led by Dr. Josita Maouene and focused on the role of body parts in verb learning and meaning.  I specifically worked on a project studying the first 100 verbs children learn.  The central questions were whether children link verbs to specific body parts and whether those relations would show structured patterns of association.  Prior results from adults suggested strong links that might reflect the nature of early learning, and the role of bodily action in children’s initial verb learning. For example, the verb “run” was heavily associated with “feet” or “legs.”  The data I collected showed that children associate verbs with body parts much like adults do.  This will lead to further research on precisely how children are learning verbs and whether it is the context the action is performed in, the object it is performed on, or what it is performed with. These experiences and particularly the opportunity to help develop methods that would lead to new and informative results cemented my interest in a future career of research and prepared me for creating my own research plan. My major area of research is in the field of social psychology and includes sterotyping, prejudice, and implicit/explicit attitude discrepencies. Currently, I am an honors student researcher in Dr. Linda B. Smith's Cognitive Development Lab. Specifically, I am researching developmental differences in the effects of a time constraint on character judgments and inferences in children and adults. This is the topic of my honors thesis which is under the direction of Dr. Jim Sherman.

Feel free to look around, learn about me and my projects, and contact me with any questions you have! The internet is also a wonderful way to network, so I hope I am able to make contact with researchers interested in the same areas of psychology that I am studying.