Research

Mentorship, Meaning, and Career Confidence

This project is researching the connections between positive mentoring relationships, purpose in life, and how those affect undergraduate students’ confidence in what careers they decide to pursue after college. The researchers are interested in examining whether any specific qualities of mentorship, such as the duration of the mentorship, the role of the mentor, frequency of contact, and whether the mentor-mentee relationship was natural or assigned, influence purpose or career confidence. The researchers will be collecting both quantitative and qualitative data to answer their questions.

Costa, C., Gbaraba, B., Okasha, M., Pigoni, G., Kucker, S.C., & Lorenz, M.G. (April 2026). Do parents' personalities turn the pages of shared storybook reading? Blitz given at the annual meeting of the Midwestern Psychological Association in Chicago, IL, and poster presented at Augustana College's Celebration of Learning. Reprint 

Jelinek, S., Empen, I., Okasha, M., Vila Gil, A., & Lorenz, M.G. (April 2026). Keep calm and count on: Temperament as a Predictor of Early Numeracy. Poster presented at the annual meeting of the Midwestern Psychological Association in Chicago, IL, and at Augustana College's Celebration of Learning. Reprint 

Okasha, M., Corts, D., Nordling, J., & Lorenz, M.G. (April 2026). The puzzle of perception: Examining parental insight and scaffolding during puzzle play. Poster presented at the annual meeting of the Midwestern Psychological Association in Chicago, IL, and at Augustana College's Celebration of Learning. Reprint 

Vasich, S., & Lorenz, M.G. (May 2025). Cellphones, caregivers, and children, oh my! Characterizing behavior within children's museum exhibits. Poster presented at the biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development. Reprint 

Aceves, I., Jocson, R., Thames, C., Lorenz, M.G., & Kucker, S.C. (April 2025). Temperament, storybook modality, and word learning: A tale not yet told. Poster presented at the annual meeting of the Midwestern Psychological Association in Chicago, IL, and at Augustana College's Celebration of Learning. Reprint 

Kucker, S.C., & Lorenz, M.G. (2025). Expanding the footnote: How minor methodological decisions have impactful consequences for developmental results. Frontiers in Developmental Psychology, 3. https://doi.org/10.3389/fdpys.2025.1629396 

Lorenz, M.G., & Kucker, S.C. (2025). To touch or not to touch: The role of vocabulary and object exploration in children's attention to shape. Infancy, 30(1), e12632. https://doi.org/10.1111/infa.12632  

Bakopoulou, M., Lorenz, M. G., Forbes, S. H., Tremlin, R., Bates, J., & Samuelson, L. K. (2023). Vocabulary and automatic attention: The relation between novel words and gaze dynamics in noun generalization. Developmental Science, 26(6), e13399. https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.13399 

Lorenz, M.G., & Plumert, J.M. (2019). Mother-child communication about relative proximity to a landmark: What role does prototypicality play? Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 178, 41-59. doi.org/10.1016/j.infbeh.2018.09.011  

Kucker, S.C., Samuelson, L.K., Perry, L.K., Yoshida, H., Colunga, E., Lorenz, M.G., & Smith, L.B. (2019). Reproducibility and a unifying explanation: Lessons from the shape bias. Infant Behavior and Development, 54, 156-165. doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2018.09.004 

Perone, S., Plebanek, D., Lorenz, M.G., Spencer, J.P., & Samuelson, L.S. (2019). Empirical tests of a brain-based model of executive function development. Child Development, 90, 210-226. doi.org/10.1111/cdev.12885  

Samuelon L.K., & Galligan, M. (2014). Dynamic systems theory and language development. In P.J. Brooks and V. Kempe (Eds.) Encyclopedia of Language Development. Sage Publications.