Herbert L. Pick - US grants

This award provides funds to continue a Research Experiences for Undergraduates Site in Cognitive and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Minnesota. The ten-week program will emphasize student participation in the research activities of faculty affiliated with the Center for Cognitive Sciences. Eleven undergraduates will participate with support from NSF. The focus on recruitment will be under-represented groups and undergraduates from small colleges in the upper Midwest with limited research opportunities. Students will: (1) work as a full member of their faculty mentor'' research team; (2) complete a research project including a written report and oral presentation to peers and participating faculty; (3) participate in a multidisciplinary research training seminar for credit; and (4) participate in a special non-credit 'Master Student' course. Seminar activities include presentations by program faculty and faculty in related areas campus-wide, laboratory tours, and lectures on research tools, design, and ethics. The fully integrated program includes opportunities for the students to learn specific research methods, to apply these methods in the context of their own research, and to examine broad conceptual and methodological issues relating to the cognitive sciences. Participation in special social and cultural 'team-building' events as well as common housing in a University dorm is designed to foster a strong community of students.

This award contributes to the Foundation's continuing efforts to attract talented students into careers in science through active undergraduate research experiences.

This is a standard award to one of three institutions collaborating as partners on Thompson's project (0121084). No current system allows a person to naturally walk through a large-scale virtual environment. The availability of such a locomotion interface would have impacts on a broad range of applications, including education and training, design and prototyping, physical fitness, and rehabilitation; for some of these applications natural walking provides a level of realism not obtainable if movement through the simulated world is controlled by devices such as a joystick, while for others realistic walking is a fundamental requirement. Prototypes have been built for a variety of computer-controlled devices on which a person can walk, but there has been little investigation of the utility of such devices as interfaces to a virtual world and almost no study at all of the interactions of visual and biomechanical perceptual cues in such devices. This project addresses key open questions, the answers to which are needed if locomotion interfaces are to offer effective interaction between users and computer simulations. An effective locomotion interface must provide users with accurate visual and biomechanical sensations of walking; thus, a key objective of this work is to determine how to synergistically combine visual information generated by computer graphics with biomechanical information generated by devices that simulate walking on real surfaces. Thompson and his collaborators will investigates methods that allow more accurate walking in a locomotion interface while accurately conveying a sense of the spaces being walked through. Specific issues to be considered include how to facilitate the perception of speed and distance traveled, how to provide a compelling sense of turning when actual walking along a curved path is not possible, how to give a user the sense that he/she is walking over a sloped surface, and more generally how to give a user a clear sense of the scale and structure of the spaces being walked through. The team's findings on these issues will be relevant across the spectrum of possible approaches to locomotion interfaces.

This award continues support for the Summer Undergraduate Research Program in the Cognitive and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Minnesota. This ten-week program will emphasize student participationh in the research activities of faculty affiliated with the Center for Cognitive Sciences. Eleven undergraduates will be selected from across the country. They will (1) work as a full member of a faculty mentor's research team; (2) give an oral presentation to peers and participating faculty and write a formal report on the research project engaged during the program; (3) take part in workshops devoted to research ethics, technical writing, and preparation for graduate studies; and (4) participate in a thrice-weekly multidisciplinary research training seminar. Seminar activities include presentations by faculty, laboratory tours, and field trips. The integrated program includes opportunities for the participants to learn specific research methods, to apply these methods in the context of their own research, and to examine broad conceptual and methodological issues relevant to the cognitive sciences and related areas. Participation in special social and cultural team building events as well as common housing in a university dormitory is designed to foster a strong community of students.

This award contributes to the Foundation's continuing efforts to attract talented students into careers in science through active undergraduate research experiences.

ABSTRACT
Proposal #0649249
PI: Dr. Jay Coleman
Title of Project: Summer Research Institute in Experimental Psychology

The Summer Research Institute in Experimental Psychology REU at the University of South Carolina permits 10 undergraduate students to conduct research with internationally recognized scientific scholars in the subfields of behavioral neuroscience, cognition, and cognitive neuroscience for eight weeks. Students are selected from undergraduate institutions nationwide including those with minority-based populations.
The SRIEP focuses minority and non-minority student interest and enthusiasm on the basic science areas of psychology. This provides students an experience in graduate level research including an opportunity to formulate and conduct an experiment with individual guidance from an energetic and supportive research faculty mentor. The student will experience major phases of experimental research including literature generation, data collection, data organization, statistical analysis, and writing a report in the style of the American Psychological Association. A research symposium allows students to present their work at the end of the SRIEP program. Students will learn advanced technology such as drug administration, behavioral testing, immunohistochemistry, confocal microscopy and gene transfer in animals, fMRI/MRI, high density EEG, ERP, and cognitive methods to study attention, deception, development, language, memory and decision making in humans. Student experiences will be enriched by weekly research seminars by faculty with assigned readings, and by weekly sessions on problems in research design and statistics in experimental psychology including discussion of ethics. The University of South Carolina Summer Research Institute in Experimental Psychology provides a forum for educating undergraduate students about the field of experimental psychology. This program emphasis is much needed, as the U.S. is perceived as the leader in fields of experimental psychology, but our universities must be able to motivate and train the best students for future careers in vital areas of behavioral and neural sciences. The Summer Research Institute provides one vehicle to enhance these goals, particularly to educate students who more limited research opportunities at their institution. Program results are documented by follow-up surveys which demonstrate higher numbers of participants entering basic science graduate programs than cohorts of non-participant program applicants.