John Jonides - US grants

The Horse H. Rackham School of Graduate Studies, the College of Engineering, and the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts at the University of Michigan hereby apply for $1,149,642 under the Research Careers for Minority Scholars Program. These funds will be used to conduct the University of michigan Research Careers for Minority Scholars (UM-RCMS) Programs, a program of undergraduate research, faculty mentoring, and related support activities to identify highly talented students who are from minority groups underrepresented in science, engineering, and mathematics and encourage them to pursue doctoral study in these fields. The UM-RCMS program will annually appoint twenty students as UM- RCMS Scholars. Ten of these students will be from the Ann Arbor Campus undergraduate program; the others will be visitors invited from Historically Black, Hispanic-serving, or Native American- serving Universities, or from colleges and universities serving large proportions of students from these underrepresented populations. A unique aspect of the proposed UM-RCMS program is the Scientific Executive Committee, composed of a distinguished group of minority faculty with exceptional science research credentials and Associate Deans from the three sponsoring units. The Scientific Executive Committee, will oversee the RCMS Scholars Program and engage in all decisions regarding its execution, including selection of the students who will be designated as UM-RCMS Scholars each year and selecting research mentors most appropriate for these students. The primary direct benefits will be an increase in research and mentoring opportunities for talented students. 1. Um-RCMS will provide a forty percent increase in the available placements for visiting students in our Summer Research program, most of which are now directed toward SEM field. 2. UM-RCMS will permit a doubling of the full year placements available for University of Michigan undergraduate students in Science, Engineering and Mathematics, and the opening of such positions for the first time to juniors and seniors in SEM fields such as Geology, Astronomy, Biology, and Economics. 3. UM-RCMS will enable the University to make a significant increase in the duration and quality of the research and mentoring experience available to the most talented students in the SEM fields. Extended benefits will be realized by faculty and students at the University of Michigan, by the University as a whole and the communities it serves, and by colleges and Universities which have joined in partnerships with the University in order to increase the diversity of this nation's academic and scientific community.

With National Science Foundation support the University of Michigan will purchase a state-of-the-art 3 Tesla MRI system: a GE Signa LX Horizon 3 T with an advanced development workstation for real-time processing of fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) data. The proposed system will be capable of acquiring up to 18 image slices/second with 20 cm field of view, 64x64 matrix echo-planar imaging over a sustained period. FMRI measures hemodynamic response as a function of change in neural activity in the face of cognitive challenge in behaving humans and thus has the ability to illuminate the brain bases of cognitive processes. The scanner will form the core of a Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Laboratory dedicated to basic research studies of cognitive processes. Co-directed by Drs. John Jonides and Douglas Noll, a cognitive scientist and biomedical engineer respectively, the instrument will be housed in newly renovated space in the University's Neuroscience Laboratory Building. The laboratory will provide facilities for researchers from cognitive neuroscience, neuroscience, biomedical engineering, physics, biostatistics, linguistics, computer science, radiology and psychiatry to explore basic issues in perception and cognition. It will thus serve to coalesce interdisciplinary work already underway at Michigan.

Two types of research will be conducted at the fMRI laboratory. The first involves numerous interdisciplinary collaborations centered around issues of cognitive process. This work concentrates largely on higher cognitive functions, especially memory and executive processes. The basic thrust is to understand the nature of storage mechanisms involved in memory and the relation of these storage mechanisms to processes used to manipulate information in memory. The second class of studies proposed for the new Laboratory center on methodological issues of data acquisition and analysis involving fMRI. One focus of this work will be on continued development of new pulse sequences that are specialized for functional data collection. Expansion and testing of new non-parametric data-analysis tools should also substantially expand the resources currently available for data treatment. The University has developed a number of programs to introduce students to fMRI research and to train scientists in use of the machine. It will actively work to attract under represented groups. The University of Michigan has allocated significant resources both the assist in purchase of the instrument and renovate a laboratory to house it.

DESCRIPTION: Executive processes play a central role in cognition. Although executive processes are difficult to define, there is general agreement that they are metaprocesses and that they include the following: (a) attention to task-relevant processes and inhibition of irrelevant processes or responses, (b) task-management, which includes switching among two or more known tasks, and planning subtasks in the correct temporal or logical order to satisfy an overall goal, (c) coding of contextual source information about an event, and (d) monitoring the current state of one's actions. There is also general agreement that these executive processes are mediated in large part by mechanisms of the prefrontal cortex, that portion of frontal cortex anterior to the motor regions. When patients have damage to these prefrontal mechanisms, their executive processes suffer dramatically. The proposed research program makes use of behavioral and fMRI studies of the first two of these executive processes, attention/inhibition and task-management. The research focuses on these two because they are at the core of discussion of executive processes and because they share a reliance on selective attention. The proposed research has three major aims: The first is to determine whether there are commonalities and differences between these two executive processes in behavioral and neural signatures. The second goal is to study the executive process of inhibition in detail. For this goal, we propose studies that should determine: (a) what brain circuitry is involved in attentional and inhibitory control, (b) how overt behavior and underlying neural circuitry differ for different sorts of inhibition, (c) whether the overt behavior and underlying circuitry depend on the content of the materials involved, and (d) whether there are systematic individual difference in inhibition both behaviorally and in the neural circuits involved. The third goal is to study task-management in detail by studying task-switching, an important component of task-management. The empirical studies in service of this goal will try to determine: (a) the basic circuitry involved, (b) changes in behavior and circuitry with changes in what has to be switched, (c) changes in behavior and underlying circuitry with the content of what is switched, and (d) whether there are systematic individual differences in task-switching that are correlated with neural differences. In addition to the experimental work, the research continues to develop a computational model for these executive processes that derives from the empirical results. Patients with frontal lesions who have deficits on one or another executive process will be studied.

[unreadable] DESCRIPTION (provided by application): The purpose of this application is to request support to create a permanent course to train graduate students, post docs, medical professionals, and basic science faculty on the use of functional MRI for psychological studies of normal and brain-injured individuals. Our aims are these: (a) to train basic researchers on the use of fMRI so that they can conduct imaging studies at their home institutions; (b) to train medical residents in the fields of psychiatry, neurology, radiology, and physical medicine on fMRI so that they can apply the techniques to their own research programs concerning mental health issues; (c) to advertise the course widely to attract a diverse body of participants from throughout the mental health research community in the United States and to support these students financially so that they can attend the course. [unreadable] The proposed course has the following features: A two-week curriculum of lectures and laboratories covering (a) the physics of MRI and fMRI, (b) the types of data acquisition routines available, (c) experimental design for blocked and event-related paradigms, (d) post-processing routines that are used on fMRI data, (e) coverage of parametric and nonparametric techniques for data analysis, (e) interpretation of brain activations, and (f) a hands-on experiment in which students collect and analyze data. In addition, we plan to offer an optional set of two evening sessions the first week of the course that will include instruction on reading structural MRI images to identify normal brain structures and to identify some typical brain abnormalities in injured brains. [unreadable] [unreadable]

Cognitive processes are often classified as either automatic or under attentional control. Automatic processes are an important component of ongoing behavior, because they free us from having to deliberate about every task that faces us. But this very automaticity creates a problem for many ongoing behaviors. Many of the stimuli we encounter and many of the tasks we face are ones in which an automatic process is not the one that is most appropriate to the present context. This is so for encoding, when attention is often drawn by salient stimuli in the environment that should not be the targets of processing. It is so for working memory, where we often have information stored that is irrelevant to the task at hand. And it is so for responding, when we often must overcome pre-potent responses to respond correctly in some situation. It is critical to understand how humans are able to overcome their automatic behaviors and engage in more controlled processing. For over 100 years, psychological experimentation and theory have grappled with understanding how interference is controlled and resolved in perceptual and memory tasks. For a time, the predominant view of interference-resolution rested on the assumption that there is a single mechanism responsible for inhibition of irrelevant or distracting information across a variety of circumstances. However, other research has led to the view that inhibitory mechanisms may vary from one task to another. How might the mechanisms of interference-resolution be similar to or different from task to task? That is the question that motivates the present application. With funding from the National Science Foundation, John Jonides is investigating two alternative dimensions to partition interference-resolution mechanisms. One rests on the proposal that different stages in the information-processing stream demand different mechanisms of interference-resolution. The hypothesis is being tested that encoding, maintenance in working memory, response selection, and response execution stages of processing have partially non-overlapping mechanisms that are engaged when there is interference that needs to be controlled. The second dimension concerns the type of information that is involved. There is evidence that verbal and spatial information are processed by different brain mechanisms in many tasks, and that interference may be resolved differently for the two types of information. The hypothesis will be tested that when there is verbal and spatial information involved in tasks for which interference must be controlled, different mechanisms are engaged.

The broader impacts of this research program will be felt in five areas. First, there will be a research seminar including graduate and undergraduate students that meets weekly to discuss ongoing research concerned with interference-resolution. Second, the research will be conducted with the participation of underrepresented students chosen from the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program. Third, the research program will make use of an NSF-funded neuroimaging facility that will serve as a vehicle to educate students about neuroimaging methods. Fourth, the proposed research will result in published papers and conference presentations that will disseminate the empirical findings and document the development of the underlying theory. Finally, in that interference-resolution processes are critical to everyday cognitive functioning, the proposed program could lead to a prescription for training regimens that may strengthen some of these processes.

Every day, people encounter temptations that they need to overcome in order to obtain desirable future outcomes. School children face them when they decide to do their homework instead of watching TV, and adults face them when they decide to save for their retirement rather than enjoy an extensive vacation. What makes it possible to resist temptation some times, but not others? Is it basic brain function and anatomy, some of which may be based on genetic variations? The goal of this research is to understand the cognitive and neural bases of self-control, in particular the ability to override impulsive responding and to delay immediate gratification in the service a delayed, but more desirable, future consequence. The investigators will examine this process in detail at three levels. First, at the level of mental processes, the researchers will examine the extent to which self-control has to do with people's ability (1) to block the entry of unwanted information (e.g., by paying attention to something else), or (2) to suppress unwanted thoughts (e.g., by thinking about something else), or (3) to stop themselves from acting (e.g., by keeping one's hand from moving). Second, self-control processes will be analyzed at the level of brain functioning and anatomy. Past research has identified areas of the brain that become particularly activated when people engage in these processes, as well as connections between areas of the brain that seem to play a key role. These functional and anatomical features will be related to effective self-control strategies, such as shutting out information, suppressing thoughts, and inhibiting behavior. Finally, self-control processes will be examined at the level of genetics. Recent research has found that variations in some genes may be related to people's ability to self-control. Modern technology has made it possible to examine which variation of these genes people have using a simple, non-invasive and cost-effective method, when the target DNA sequences are known. Using such methods, the researchers will determine if these known gene variations are also related to the three mental processes, as well as the brain functioning and anatomy associated with them.

The participants will come from a longitudinal study, which began with a sample of 306 participants when they were enrolled in preschool in the early 1970s. The ability to pursue long-term goals in the face of immediate temptation was assessed once every decade since the original testing. Participants have now reached their late 30s and early 40s, and information about their life-outcomes, such as their occupational, marital, and physical health, and mental health status are becoming available. In the proposed project, we will study two groups of people in this longitudinal study. Individuals in one group have displayed high levels of self-control consistently over four decades, and those in the other group have consistently displayed self-control abilities well below the average of the cohort. By comparing these groups, we hope to learn the extent to which basic mental processes, brain functions and anatomy, and genetic variations are related to self-control. What we learn from this study may lead to a more precise understanding of the mechanisms that enable self-control, and may provide a foundation for future intervention to facilitate people's efforts to exert self-control.

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The concept of "interference" has played a central role in theories of perception and memory. For over 100 years, psychological experimentation and theory have been focused on understanding how interference is resolved in perceptual, memory, and motor processes. In current parlance, the resolution of interference requires the engagement of executive processes to control the trajectory of cognition. We propose research on interference-resolution that has two main goals: One is to understand mechanisms of interference- resolution operating at different states of processing, leading to creation of psychological and neural models of these mechanisms. The second goal is to apply this basic research to Major Depressive Disorder (MOD). For a time, the predominant view of interference-resolution rested on the assumption that there is a single mechanism to control interference. This mechanism was claimed to be inhibition of irrelevant or distracting information. However, other research has led to the view that there are multiple mechanisms that may vary from one task to another. We ask how these mechanisms are similar to and different from one another. Studying individuals diagnosed with major depression provides an important model for testing our assumptions about the neurological and cognitive environment associated with these processes. This is because the cortical areas that are active during interference-resolution overlap those that have been implicated in depression. Further, understanding the cognitive processes that are dysfunctional in depressives will further help to refine cognitive models of depression, leading to more efficacious therapy. We propose to use variations of the item-recognition task to investigate issues of interference-resolution. Modifying this paradigm permits us to study interference that occurs at the time of encoding, when information is stored in working memory, and at the time of response selection. There is some indication that patients with clinical depression have compromised abilities to resolve interference at all of these stages, but interference in working memory appears to be particularly prominent. We hypothesize that a deficit in removing unwanted information from working memory is related to rumination in depressed patients, and that interference-resolution deficits at other states of processing may be related to other aspects of the disease. Relevance of this research to public health: Patients with Major Depressive Disorder often engage in what is called rumination, continued focusing on negative thoughts that recycle over and over again. The proposed research examines the cognitive and brain deficits that may lead to rumination in the hope that these may be singled out for treatment.

Complex tasks frequently require holding in mind several ideas at once. For example, when performing mental addition we must juggle several numbers in mind while applying operations to update those numbers. It is well-established that there are distinct limits to the amount of information that can be held in mind at any given time and that these limits have a close relationship to our abilities to reason and to comprehend -- in short, to our intelligence. However, the fundamental architecture of the short-term memory system responsible for these capacity limits remains unclear. Recent psychological research suggests that distinctions can be drawn between a single piece of information at the forefront of the mind, other information that is being held in mind, but currently not the focus of attention, and information that is not being held in mind, but available in long-term memory. The goal of this project is to understand the brain mechanisms responsible for representing these different states of information. With support from the National Science Foundation, Dr. John Jonides and colleagues at the University of Michigan will investigate the architecture of short-term memory using functional magnetic resonance imaging. The research will examine neural responses as human volunteers retain, retrieve, and update information in the various putative states of short-term memory. In addition to traditional measures that afford brain localization of function, the research will employ analyses that examine functional networks of brain activation, thus elucidating brain mechanisms by which short-term memory is achieved. The work will also examine neural responses to different types of information, such as verbal, spatial, and pictorial information and examine the brain networks involved in subserving short-term memory of each form.

Since much of human intelligence depends on capacity limits of short-term memory, understanding how the brain implements short-term memory could have substantial impact on cognition as a whole. The understanding furthered by this research may inform methods that aim to increase short-term memory capacity and intelligence. This research project will also provide comprehensive training functional magnetic resonance imaging techniques to undergraduate and graduate students involved in the project. Findings from this study will be disseminated widely through publications and a seminar.

Improving Fluid Intelligence by Training Working Memory

Principal Investigator: John Jonides
University of Michigan

Fluid intelligence (an important component of what is usually termed "IQ") is the ability to reason and to solve new problems independently of previously acquired knowledge, and so it is considered one of the most important factors in learning. Moreover, fluid intelligence is closely related to professional and educational success. There is considerable agreement that fluid intelligence is highly heritable, but this does not mean that it cannot be influenced by education and socialization. Recently, the research group of Dr. John Jonides at the University of Michigan published a widely acclaimed article in which they report evidence of transfer from training on a demanding working memory task to measures of fluid intelligence. Working memory is the system that is responsible for the short-term storage of information to be used in the service of higher-level cognitive processing. Individuals were trained on a working memory task that required simultaneously holding in mind spatial and verbal information that constantly had to be updated as the task continued. This working memory training effect is a surprising finding both because previous efforts to train IQ have thus far not been successful, and because it is all too rare to find transfer effects from any training task to another task that differs from the trained task in content. The transfer in question resulted even though the trained task was entirely different from the intelligence test itself. Furthermore, the results indicated that the amount of gain in IQ critically depended on the amount of training: the more training, the more improvement in fluid intelligence. The present NSF-funded project seeks to examine the brain basis of this training effect. It is based on the rationale that successful transfer from working memory to measures of intelligence must come about because there are brain mechanisms in common between the two. The project involves testing participants' fluid intelligence, training them for 5 weeks on a working memory task that has been shown to influence fluid intelligence, and then testing their fluid intelligence after training. Crucially, participants will be scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while they take intelligence tests, early and late in training on working memory, and then again when they take intelligence tests after training. The data should yield important insights about the brain regions that underlie working memory and fluid intelligence and whether these regions overlap between the two sets of tasks as expected.

This research project is significant in several ways. First, understanding the relationship between working memory and fluid intelligence leads the way to developing training schemes to improve fluid intelligence. There can be little doubt that facilitating the intelligence of individuals can only yield benefits for society in its productivity and its intellectual approach to society's problems. Second, understanding the brain mechanisms that are shared in common between working memory and intelligence permits prediction about what cognitive skills will be lost after certain brain traumas and what remediations may be effective. Third, undergraduates, graduate students, and postdoctoral researchers who are engaged in the project will learn the fundamentals of scanning in the functional magnetic resonance imaging environment as well as experimental skills, thereby strengthening their scientific training.

The threat of Ebola gripping our nation has incited a crisis that has far-reaching implications for public health and policy. This poses an important and timely opportunity to simultaneously (a) advance scientific knowledge concerning how self-control works in consequential, high-stakes contexts, and (b) translate existing research in this area to enhance public health and policy surrounding Ebola and future crises involving similar threats. The proposed research will capitalize on these opportunities by using methods from neuroscience and social psychology to examine whether a well-studied, simple linguistic shift that promotes self-control can be harnessed to reduce anxiety and enhance short- and long-term Ebola-related decision-making and behavior. This project was submitted in response to NSF 15-006 Dear Colleague Letter on the Ebola Virus.

Previous work by the PI (Ethan Kross, University of Michigan) and colleagues has shown that using one's own name to refer to the self during introspection (i.e., "Why is Ethan feeling this way?"), rather than the first person pronoun "I" (i.e., "Why am I feeling this way?"), powerfully enhances people's ability to control their thoughts, feelings, and behavior under stress, facilitates emotionally intelligent decision-making, and does so effortlessly. These shifts in language facilitate self-control by providing the psychological distance needed to calmly navigate stressful thoughts and events. Building on this work, the proposed research will manipulate whether people reflect on their thoughts and feelings about Ebola using 1st or 3rd person perspectives, and examine whether these shifts in language reduce Ebola-related anxiety and irrational decision-making and behavior.

? DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): We propose to continue to offer an annual two-week short course on functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging at the University of Michigan in August of each year. This course is fully the same as a semester-length course, but is offered at a convenient time and in a compact format that readily fits into the schedules of graduate students, medical residents, post docs, and faculty. The curriculum covers the physics of MRI and fMRI, coverage of data acquisition, a detailed presentation of issues having to do with experimental design, and substantial coverage of data analysis and interpretation. Students will get the opportunity to design an experiment, and analyze data that have been gathered previously. The proposed short course will be open to graduate students, post doctoral fellows, faculty, medical students, and medical residents. Via the proposed grant, we shall invite 25 attendees from outside the University of Michigan, selected by an admissions committee after extensive recruitment of applicants. The grant will cover travel and subsistence, with no tuition for the course. There is a comprehensive evaluation of the effectiveness of the course immediately after it is complete, as well as an evaluation 8 months later to assess how well attendees have been able to integrate the contents of the course into their research agendas.

Identifying interventions that can lead to cognitive benefits may have broad implications for education, successful aging, and amelioration of cognitive decline. There has been intense investigation of whether the training of working memory can enhance cognitive functioning, but with controversial outcomes. There is however recent evidence that cognitive training of working memory and other cognitive skills can benefit from non-invasive brain stimulation applied during training. In particular, repeated application of direct current stimulation to certain regions of the scalp can improve the outcomes of a training program intended to improve working memory. Furthermore, this enhancement effect is maintained after for up to several months or a year post-training without subsequent training or stimulation. In the proposed research, we examine the neurobiological mechanisms by which this improvement may occur. Given the potential effectiveness of direct current stimulation, its accessibility and low cost, understanding the neural mechanisms by which stimulation exerts its effects could have direct implications for constructing more effective interventions.

The neural mechanisms by which current stimulation achieves its facilitative effects on memory are largely unknown. The research program will combine transcranial direct current stimulation with simultaneous functional neuroimaging to examine the effect of stimulation on underlying neural activity. Individuals will be trained on a short-term memory task for several days and will be scanned as training proceeds. The neuroimaging data collected will measure local perfusion stages that accompany the stimulation during the training itself, when accompanied by different types of transcranial stimulation. The studies will 1) compare network connectivity with and without stimulation as learning proceeds over the course of a training intervention and 2) compare the impact of stimulation on neural activity when the anode and cathode are reversed. Electrode placement sites will be optimally adjusted based on each participant's individual activation patterns during a working memory task. The results of these studies will address the nature of the cognitive changes due to working memory training with direct cortical stimulation as well as the relationship of these changes to patterns of neural activity.

The threat of the COVID-19 virus has not been clearly understood by a substantial portion of the U.S. population. Many people have been slow to adopt attitudes and behaviors that will serve to mitigate the risks of the pandemic. With all the publicity that the virus has engendered, how can this be so? The researchers hypothesize that these failures to change attitude and behavior stem from three factors: failures to realize the impact that this disease has, failures to realize how quickly it will be transmitted, and failures to appreciate the dire consequences it will have on the health care system. In this study, the researcher will examine factors underlying these failures and ways to improve delivery of information relevant to COVID-19. Results and suggestions for improving communication and comprehension are expected to be disseminated widely and expeditiously.

In order to investigate ways of improving the understanding of the risks involving COVID-19, the researchers, a highly experienced and inter-disciplinary team, propose three lines of research. They will examine (a) how different ways of presenting information about the proliferation of the disease affects people?s estimates of its incidence and rates of death, as well as intended future social behavior, (b) how individual differences among individuals and countries along demographic and trait dimensions will influence their estimates of the spread of the disease, and (c) how people are reasoning about the impact of the disease on the viability of the healthcare system. Methods will include measuring the ability to predict risk and consequences of the disease as well as the impact of ?flattening the curve? as functions of several variables, including mode of information presentation, numeracy, motivation, health status, and other demographic and trait variables.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.