C. Sue Carter - US grants

9513256 Carter This proposal is for partial support for a conference that will deal with the neural and physiological underpinnings of social and affiliate behavior in higher vertebrates. A unique feature of this conference is that it will bring together scientists representing fields as apparently diverse as social psychology and neuroendocrinology with the intent of integrating knowledge concerning affliative behavior gained from these different disciplines. In addition, the biology of social and affiliative behavior will be examined in a variety of species. The integration of knowledge gained from comparative as well as multidisciplinary approaches should facilitate advancement of our understanding of the biological basis of affiliative behavior.

Research at the frontiers of science now requires global collaborations, terabyte data infrastructures, and software tools for automating research and enabling collaboration. With funding from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Bertenthal and his colleagues will develop a Social Informatics Data (SID) Grid. The SID Grid will enable researchers to collect real-time multimodal behavior at multiple time scales. The development of a distributed data warehouse supported by a grid infrastructure will embolden researchers to address research questions that far exceed the capacities of any individual lab, such as how we construct our cognitive, social and cultural worlds through multimodal channels of communication, including speech, gesture, prosody, posture, facial expression, etc. or how the unfolding in real-time of social behaviors is a function of their neurobiological underpinnings, developmental status, context and cultural norms. The creation of the SID Grid will provide the needed infrastructure for supporting collaborative research in the social and behavioral sciences. This infrastructure will encourage data sharing and accelerate the development of standards for collecting and coding physiological and behavioral data. Outreach and dissemination will consist of creating a website with tutorials for using the SID Grid, organizing workshops on use of the infrastructure, and soliciting researchers to conduct multimodal research in the SuperLab. The availability of these databases and software tools promises to help usher in the next generation of behavioral sciences and scientists.