Michael Dougherty, Ph.D. - US grants

9730065 Dougherty ScienceGate II is the second in a series of conferences of developers of comprehensive high school science curricula to explore the connections between disciplinary curricula. In the previous conference it was discovered that there was a common vision about the nature of science and how science is taught. This conference continues that dialogue and explores other issues of mutual concern including evaluation and dissemination.

0730727 Micikas The BSCS (Biological Sciences Curriculum Study) is working with an advisory panel to do an in-depth study of integrated science for high school level courses. The project acknowledges the growing interest in integrated science as states have increased their science requirements for graduation and as states, school districts, and individual schools have struggled to implement various standards in science education. This project is to help make sense of the diverse assumptions now in place about the goals, placement of, and content for integrated science in high school. The work plan involves solicitation of substantive guidance from constituencies concerned with integrated science such as scientific organizations, publishers, teacher educators, teachers, science educators, mathematics educators, specialists in technology, and state science supervisors. The advisory committee sets the framework for the design study and reviews the process of the BSCS staff. The projected outcome is a report available in hard copy and on the BSCS web site.

A fundamental component of judgment and decision making is hypothesis evaluation, a process that is embedded in many real-world tasks. For example, physicians presumably consider the likelihood of various diseases prior to issuing a diagnosis, mechanics presumably assess the likelihood of various causes of automobile failure before investing time and money in repairs, and auditors presumably evaluate the likelihood of various sources of accounting errors prior to pursuing the sources of errors. Tied to the process of hypothesis evaluation is the process of hypothesis generation. Hypothesis generation involves the generation, or recall, of the to-be-evaluated hypotheses. Hypothesis generation is an equally important component of judgment, as the outcome of the generation process determines which alternative hypotheses ultimately are evaluated by the decision maker.

The purpose of the present research is to examine both the hypothesis evaluation and hypothesis generation aspects of judgment within the context of mainstream memory theory. In particular, this research will focus on testing and extending a memory model (Minerva-DM) to account for how people make judgments of probability and how they generate hypotheses. The overall goal of this research is to provide an integrative theory of likelihood judgment and hypothesis generation while accounting for most of the likelihood judgment phenomena in the judgment-under-uncertainty literature.

A fundamental component of human decision making is how people generate, assess, and test diagnostic hypotheses. Take the task of a clinical diagnostician as an example. The clinician's task is similar to that of a detective in that he or she is compelled to search for clues (i.e., data) that can be used to generate and test possible explanations of the presenting symptoms. The clinician presumably generates likely diagnoses (i.e., disease hypotheses) and actively seeks information to evaluate the generated diagnoses. The clinician's search for information in the environment likely is not random, but is instead guided by those diagnostic hypotheses he or she is presently entertaining. The information or data newly revealed through the search process is used to both evaluate the diagnoses currently under consideration as well as generate new diagnoses. The generation of new diagnoses may, in turn, lead to fresh information search threads where new hypotheses might be brought to mind. At some point, either the search space is exhausted, the clinician continually fails to generate additional plausible hypotheses, or one particular hypothesis gains enough evidential support that the clinician can render a diagnosis with confidence.

The goal of the proposed research is two fold. One goal is to better understand the cognitive constraints that govern hypothesis generation, probability judgment, and information search in humans. Understanding these cognitive constraints hopefully will enable us to developed methodologies or technologies to improve diagnostic decision making in real-world decision tasks such as medical diagnosis or intelligence analysis. The second goal is to develop a cognitive model of human judgment that can take as input a piece of data (e.g., a symptom) and generate a set of diagnostic hypotheses to explain that datum, provide probability estimates of the generated hypotheses, and revise both the generated hypotheses and the probability judgments iteratively as new data are experienced. This type of system has natural implications both for understanding human decision making in dynamic tasks and for developing artificial intelligence systems that can outperform human decision makers.

The American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG), the Genetics Society of America (GSA), the National Science Resources Center (NSRC) and the National Association of Biology Teachers (NABT) are using the broad theme of genetics to build a framework to form long-term collaborations between educators and scientists and a sustainable infrastructure to support meaningful outreach by scientists in the high school science classroom. The Geneticist-Educator Network of Alliances (GENA) Project provides the partnering scientific societies with tools to instruct, facilitate, and measure the meaningful engagement of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) faculty members in secondary science education. The GENA Project is exploring ways in which a professional society-monitored secondary science education outreach effort can play a positive role in the career development of both junior (pre-tenure) and senior (post-tenure) level genetics faculty. The project is developing a network of 92 master Geneticist-Educator alliances to design teaching strategies related to standards and misconceptions in genetics that can decrease the time required for scientists to prepare for outreach, thus maximizing the effective and meaningful interaction between the geneticists and students. Geneticists and high school biology teachers attend workshops to examine genetics content inherent in state science education standards and key misconceptions in genetics education and to review exemplary educational materials in genetics and receive guidance in implementing lessons. Exemplary inquiry-based educational materials in genetics are being utilized to design methods to facilitate meaningful interactions between scientists and their local education community. The nationwide cadre of 92 master high school biology teachers serve as training leaders in their local school districts. Detailed teaching strategies and case studies are being disseminated nationally through current Math and Science Partnerships and a publicly accessible website sponsored by both ASHG and GSA. The project is developing a model program, adaptable by other disciplinary scientific societies.

Gary Paul Green
Michael L. Dougherty
University of Wisconsin-Madison

Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras sought to integrate into the global economy in the mid 1990s, in part, through foreign direct investment (FDI) in the mineral sector. Spatially incorporating rural communities into the global economy through gold mining has galvanized civic opposition to mining projects in the region. As these anti-mining movements have blossomed across Central America, governments have responded harshly to reassure foreign investors. Ironically, however, as state and civil society determinedly confront each other over the mining issue, this political instability has discouraged foreign investment in other economic sectors. Mining-led market integration has made Central America a less attractive investment environment for the kinds of FDI that best contribute to the economy through job creation, technology and learning spillovers, and linkages with other economic sectors. The prominent literatures on globalization and development?the dependency school, the neoclassical frame, and the developmentalist state literature, do not account for the emergence of this paradox. Instead, these cases may constitute the emergence of a new model of mineral-led market integration in the neoliberal era, where relationships between states, firms and communities are reconfigured. Incorporating political process theory to frame civic opposition, public choice theory to frame state intervention, and a commodity chain analysis of the global gold mining industry may help illuminate this reconfiguration. To explore the stand-off between state and civil society at the core of this development paradox, this dissertation poses two research questions: 1) how do rural communities make sense of their integration into the global economy through gold mining? And 2) how do these governments negotiate their social contractual obligations to civil society with their contractual obligations to foreign capital? Data collection will involve twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork in rural communities in these three nations, as well as interviews with key informants in government, the mining sector, and civic society. This research advances discovery and sociological knowledge by probing the limits of the ?grand theories? of development and globalization in the context of current restructuring in the global gold industry, the growth of transnational and national social movements, and the political parameters of neoliberal foreign direct investment policies. The results of this research will be disseminated through university courses, public lectures, and Spanish-language publications facilitated by IARNA.

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).

Studying activity of the human brain non-invasively is a major scientific challenge, yet it is essential for enhancing our understanding of the neural bases of action, emotion, and thought. A major technological advancement in studying the neural basis of behavior has been the development of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a hemodynamic technique based on the tight coupling between neuronal activity and oxygenated blood flow. fMRI is a powerful tool for non-invasively measuring local changes in the brain with high spatial resolution (~1 mm) in the blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) signal. Additionally, structural imaging using MRI can characterize volumetric differences in brain tissue and specify major pathways of neural processing and transmission. These approaches can be combined with other neuroimaging data examining the temporal dynamics of brain activity, to establish a more complete understanding of the human brain and the neural processes underlying human cognition, action, and emotion.

A state-of-the-art 3-Tesla Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanner will provide access to this powerful technology to the University of Maryland College Park community for studying human brain activity. The MRI scanner will serve as the centerpiece of the Brain Imaging Center at Maryland (BICAM) and will transform the research and educational environment at the University of Maryland. The scanner will provide the foundation for research in cognitive and affective neuroscience, with specific foci on human development, attention and memory, decision making and risk, motor-control, and language and communication. The center will also create opportunities for innovations in signal processing and magnetic resonance physics. The center and its shared instrumentation will foster an intensive learning environment through the integration of research and education within the University of Maryland and through its partnerships in the local community. The MRI scanner will enhance graduate and undergraduate education through directed research projects, courses with a hands-on focus in functional neuroimaging, and accessibility to students from underrepresented groups. The center will also sponsor a summer institute in developmental cognitive neuroscience which will bring experts in the study of brain development and neuroimaging to the University of Maryland.

BICAM is part of the Neuroscience and Cognitive Science (NACS) program at the University of Maryland. This program consists of faculty from traditional behavioral and neuroscience departments such as Psychology, Human Development, Linguistics, Hearing and Speech, and Kinesiology, as well as faculty from Computer Science, Physics, Applied Mathematics, and Electrical and Computer Engineering with expertise in imaging, signal processing, and the physical basis of magnetic resonance technology. Acquisition of the new scanner will lead to broad interdisciplinary collaboration in areas of the basic physical and behavioral sciences with the goal of understanding the neural bases of behavior.

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).

This project is to renovate outdated laboratory suites in the Biology/Psychology Building on the campus of the University of Maryland - College Park to create the Joint Center for Cognitive, Social, Computational, and Mathematical Neuroscience. The Center will include shared laboratory space designed to support brain imaging, eye-tracking, computationally intensive data analysis, and collaborative research in neuroscience. The facility will be used by 50-60 researchers, including the faculty of the Psychology Department, their postdoctoral researchers, research assistants, graduate and undergraduate students, and collaborators from across the campus and partner institutions.

The combination of shared and dedicated laboratory facilities in the Joint Center is designed to bring together researchers and students in various disciplines who have overlapping interests and use overlapping methodologies. The unique, multidisciplinary arrangement will enable researchers to work side-by-side using shared imaging, electrophysiological, eye-tracking, digital coding, and computational facilities and reach a level of synergy and collaboration that is well beyond what normally occurs in individual laboratories. Areas of research that will be enabled by the Joint Center include cognitive development, judgment and decision processes, visual processes, emotion and affective processes, and social and cross-cultural processes. Specifically the Joint Center will support research projects such as examining the efficacy of cognitive training for improving cognitive functioning, studying the neural mechanisms involved in object recognition and suppression of background clutter, examining the culture-specific effect, if any, on fundamental judgment and decision processes which are most relevant to global conflict and cooperation, and exploring the relationship between attention and physiological processes and social relations such as infant attachment at both the behavioral and neural levels.

The Joint Center will have a tremendously positive impact on the quality of research and research training at the University of Maryland and will serve as a model for future collaborative centers devoted to behavioral and brain research. The Joint Center will also facilitate undergraduate education and outreach efforts to improve diversity within the university and the affected scientific fields. The Joint Center design and layout will greatly increase the ability of the university to integrate education and research in psychology through undergraduate honors research, as well as to provide undergraduate research opportunities to local colleges and universities with significant numbers of students from underrepresented groups. Space will be reserved in the Joint Center to support a research partnership with faculty from Morgan State University and their students.

Recalling information from memory can be thought of as a search process. Thus, an important aspect of recall is deciding when to stop searching. This is true whether remembering things that are fairly mundane, such as recalling the titles of one's favorite books, to remembering things that are crucial, such as a physician generating potential diagnostic hypotheses. Although the importance of criteria for search termination is recognized in most contemporary models of memory and decision making, very little is known about the processes that underlie these decisions. The research conducted by Dr. Dougherty and colleagues tests the applicability of a cost-benefit framework for describing both memory search and search termination decisions. Within this framework, costs are incurred by the act of searching (which takes time and effort), and gains are realized through successful outcomes. The notion that search termination decisions flow from a system that regulates costs and benefits raises two broad questions. First, in what ways do the costs and benefits of retrieval influence both search termination decisions and the time course of retrieval? Second, what role does monitoring the search process (a form of "metacognition") play? The working hypothesis is that appropriate search termination decisions enable one to maximize the utility of any particular recall attempt and that metacognitive monitoring plays an important role in this process.

Understanding the fundamental nature of search termination decisions has important implications for understanding the basic functioning of human memory and the role of memory in decision making. This is important for a variety of real-world contexts. For example, in time-critical triage situations, medical personnel must quickly retrieve potential diagnostic hypotheses from memory to render a treatment decision. Premature search termination may lead to an incorrect diagnosis whereas protracted search may compromise the care of other time-critical patients. This research may help improve information search efficiency and decision making quality.

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) requests financial support to partially defray speaker and participant travel expenses for an Ancestry Inference Roundtable to be held in May, 2012, in Chicago, IL. This meeting will build on an earlier ASHG position statement (ASHG, 2008) and the recommendations of an ASHG ancestry task force, which were published in the American Journal of Human Genetics (Royal et al., 2010). The purpose of the meeting will be to facilitate further discussion with a broader community of ancestry researchers, direct-to-consumer ancestry testing companies, and other stakeholders and to develop best practices and guidelines regarding genetic ancestry inference in academia and industry. The specific aims of the roundtable are to develop: 1. Best practices for inferring genetic and genomic ancestry; 2. Guidelines for the application and presentation of genetic ancestry inference results in different settings in industry and academia - personal ancestry testing, genetic epidemiology, genetic anthropology, etc.; 3. Strategies for encouraging use of best practices and guidelines; 4. Mechanisms for determining and addressing the potential impact of genetic ancestry inference on individuals and communities; and 5. Recommendations for education and engagement about genetic ancestry information. A Planning Committee of experts representing a diverse and essential constituency, chaired by Dr. Charmaine Royal and Dr. Michael Bamshad, has been assembled and will provide intellectual direction for the project. The roundtable discussions will be organized and hosted by ASHG, which is also providing financial and logistical support.

Research in decision-making has increasingly focused on the use of heuristics, or short cuts, to describe judgment and decision-making, such as recent work on rationality and fast-and-frugal heuristics. The central purpose of research on fast-and-frugal heuristics is to characterize the various strategies that people employ across a variety of decision tasks, with the goal of understanding the interplay between task structure and strategy use. At the same time, other work in judgment and decision-making has begun exploring the interrelationship between basic-level cognitive processes such as attention and memory and higher-level processes involved in decision-making. For example, recent work illustrates that theoretical models based on long-term memory and working-memory are important for understanding judgment and decision making in a variety of real-world domains, such as medical diagnosis and intelligence analysis. The overarching goal of the present research is to integrate the fast-and-frugal heuristics approach with a judgment model based on basic memory theory. The researchers' goal is to address, both empirically and theoretically, how basic memory processes such as long-term memory and working memory both enable and constrain the use of fast-and-frugal heuristics. The resulting theoretical and empirical research will advance fundamental theory broadly in the area of judgment and decision making.

Research on fast-and-frugal heuristics has been amongst the most influential and widely cited work within the area of judgment and decision-making over the past few decades. However, despite the proliferation of research on fast-and-frugal heuristics, aspects of the framework remain somewhat ill-defined. In particular, while the framework relies extensively on constructs from the area of memory, relatively little theoretical and empirical work has pursued this aspect of heuristic functioning. Yet, this is an important component of most real-world judgment and choice tasks, as the input to the decision process often relies upon the output of memory. The proposed work aims to address this gap in the literature by systematically investigating the role of memory in cue-based inference tasks where heuristics such as Take-the-best are assumed to operate. In addition to the project's contribution to the empirical literature, this work will break new ground on theoretical models of decision-making by merging fast-and-frugal heuristics with a memory-processes model of hypothesis generation and judgment. The proposed experiments will provide a detailed analysis of the underlying memory processes that both enable and constrain memory-based inference. The knowledge gained from this research has the potential to impact decision making in applied contexts such as risk communication and medicine, where heuristic rules are implemented as decision aids.

This award will support the conduct of a workshop focused on identifying and evaluating the scientific basis for neuroscience-based learning interventions. The workshop will bring together leading researchers who are working at the intersection of neuro-, cognitive, and educational sciences to address questions pertaining to the theoretical, empirical and methodological bases of interventions and technologies that purport to enhance learning and memory. The workshop will take place in Washington, D.C., in January 2015.

The goals of the workshop are to (a) identify the current state of effective learning interventions and technologies; (b) discuss methodological and statistical challenges that have impeded scientific work in this area and propose solutions to these challenges; and (c) discuss ways of effectively and accurately communicating the scientific literature on neuroscience-based interventions to the broader public. A summary report will be produced that details the products of the discussion and that highlights prospects identified for evidence-based learning techniques based on neuroscientific principles.