Carolyn is a Developmental Psychology Ph.D. Candidate in the Centre for Cognitive Development with Dr. Darko Odic studying the social and cognitive tools that underlie children’s learning. Her dissertation work, funded by a SSHRC Canada Graduate Scholarship, focuses on how children make sense of our noisy and confusing world through their sense of certainty. She also actively pursues research on children’s developing social skills and the use of pretense in educational contexts.

Carolyn’s research investigates how children make sense of the noisy and confusing world we live in. Her work focuses on some of the general learning mechanisms that help children learn about a variety of information: our sense of certainty, our ability to teach, and our ability to pretend.

Baer, C. & Odic, D. (in press). The relationship between children’s approximate number confidence and formal mathematics. Journal of Numerical Cognition.

Baer, C. & Odic, D. (2019). Certainty in numerical judgments develops independently of the Approximate Number System. Cognitive Development, 52, 100817. doi:10.1016/j.cogdev.2019.100817

Baer, C., Gill, I.K., & Odic, D. (2018). A domain-general sense of confidence in children. Open Mind: Discoveries in Cognitive Science, 1, 208-218. doi:10.1162/opmi_a_00020

Baer, C. & Friedman, O. (2018). Fitting the message to the listener: Children selectively mention general and specific information. Child Development, 89, 461-475. doi:10.1111/cdev.12751

Baer, C. & Friedman, O. (2016). Children’s generic interpretation of pretense. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 150, 99-111. doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2016.05.004

• Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (2017-2020)
• Four-Year Doctoral Fellowship, University of British Columbia (2016-2020)
• Elizabeth Young Lacey Scholarship, University of British Columbia (2015)