If you are interested in joining our lab as a graduate student or postdoctoral fellow, do drop Joan a note! We're always eager to have a conversation about the potential synergy between your interests and the lab's, and we can discuss the possibilities of your joining the team from there.
If you are looking to get research experience and are interested in sorts of questions we ask in the lab (especially in the nature of visual perception and how it connects with broader mental life), you are also more than welcome to reach out. Generally, having some background or familiarity in cognitive science and/or research methods in psychology will help a lot, but we would also be happy to have you if you are coming from a completely different discipline (say, philosophy, or the arts) but want to explore questions about the mind.
In our lab, an RA usually will work closely with Joan and/or the graduate students in the lab to explore different questions involving how the mind works. This can include helping out with data collection and participating in lab meetings. But you will also be strongly encouraged to develop your own project from start to finish -- from designing your own experiments, analyzing the data, presenting your work in conferences, to eventually writing this work up for publication. The idea is for you to be able to pursue the questions that capture your imagination, rather than just doing work to answer someone else's questions. Usually, RAs might start out on a volunteer basis to 'test the waters', and then we can discuss eventually getting course credit or pay.
If this sounds right for you, you can email Joan the following: (1) your name and major; (2) why you are interested in getting research experience; and (3) any prior research experience and relevant skills (e.g., programming, data analysis) that you might have. We also encourage you to check out recent papers from the lab, and see if any of those inspire new research questions/ideas for you.