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By MARTY LEVINE
Compared to the old Learning Research and Development Center (LRDC) building — which seemed to be leaning back into the hillside above O’Hara Street while still jutting into space over it — the new LRDC offices in the Murdoch Building at 3420 Forbes seem hidden away, a short block from Magee-Womens Hospital.
“We’re not technically on campus here,” says LRDC spokesperson Liz Rangel, letting a visitor in.
But the space is full of light and — say multiple Pitt researchers who moved here amid the pandemic, when the old building was demolished for new recreation space — even more conducive to collaboration.
The old LRDC spread its population among nine floors with many long hallways, while the entire coterie of research scientists and their associated graduate and undergraduate students are on three and a half newly renovated floors of Murdoch. There are glass-walled kitchens overlooking Oakland’s busy, busy traffic and construction and large panes letting sunlight flood the low cubicles in other hallways, so the whole thing feels more open, despite its traditional layout.
The new space is temporary, perhaps for five years — until the LRDC can move where the School of Computing and Information now lives, when SCI gets its own new building. But LRDC research scientists don’t seem to be looking back at what used to be … apart from that framed photo of the old building near Rangel’s office and that other large poster of it in the conference room.
“I love the new space,” says psychology faculty member Melissa Libertus, standing in her KiT Lab (The Kids' Thinking Lab) — set up with a “game-like environment,” she says, to study math skills in 1- to 5-year-olds. It looks like a pediatrician’s office waiting room, with its colorful, animal-themed playthings that keep hands and minds busy. The new space, Libertus says, brings all her staff and students together in one spot. “It is a very welcoming space and a productive one” — even without the large mural that decorated the lab’s old digs.
There are smaller rooms in the KiT lab for testing individual kids: In a number line from 1 to 100, can you find 72? Can you count the food items in your bag at the pretend grocery?
“Early math is really a predictor of academic achievement in general,” says Libertus. “A lot of parents know it is important to read to their kids,” she adds, but not enough parents know that math is something they need to teach early on as well. Even before kids learn to read, she says, they have an understanding of “more” and “less,” for instance, and how well they exhibit such understanding is an early indicator of their future success in school.
In the LRDC conference room, students from all over the building have gathered for the weekly cognitive talk series, to hear their fellow students present their research projects. They eat lunch in chairs wheeled up to several long tables, surrounded by a pair of mammoth videoscreens.
Of course, some LRDC spaces have nothing more unusual than four walls, a ceiling and a floor, designed principally to keep people upright in one space and out of another. It’s the work inside them that’s colorful. In one, for instance, a pair of paramedics in training at the nearby Center for Emergency Medicine is crouched on the floor over a simulated motorcycle crash victim, while a third runs an app being tested.
“You have a limited amount of weeks before you are on a truck doing this on real patients,” says EMS-worker-in-training Matt Wrzesniewski, who is kneeling beside the wounded doll, assessing chest and cranium. They could always use more practice, he says. Enter the MedDbriefer, the app under development in the lab of LRDC Research Associate Sandra Katz, which helps paramedics practice their routines and responses.
“It tells you what you did right” — and what you missed, notes another EMS student, Erin O’Meara, testing the app. “We work on better feedback for people running the scenarios.”
On another floor, in the lab of LRDC Director Charles Perfetti, Max Helfrich and Gaisha Oralova are awaiting the arrival of the next testing subject for an EEG and eye movement tracking. The aim: to see how those learning English as a second language accomplish this task, hoping to make it easier in future to teach native speakers of, say, Mandarin or Spanish in different ways. About 15 people each week are tested in hour-and-a-half sessions, showing how their brains react at misspellings or conceptual disconnects in a sentence, such as “I ate my drink” or “I ate my toaster.”
One small colorful space, with animal-magnet-covered filing cabinets, shelves and bags of testing materials and stuffed animals and children’s books, is for the Parents Promoting Early Learning studies: long-term looks at how parent-child interactions support early childhood learning through observations, parent interviews and other methods. The area outside this office is full of cubes but flooded with light streaming in huge windows, and those working nearby are students and staff central to these projects.
If anyone needs a break from the action, there is a fourth-floor terrace where receptions and social events are held, but which is very quiet when empty — despite the long view down Halket and Coltart streets behind the building. Paved in gray tile, rimmed with a low brick-red wall and covered only in clouds, the space would make a good place for resting from the testing … at least until the whole place has to move again in a few years.
Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.
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