Akira Miyake - US grants

This project aims to futher our understanding of the neural representations that underlie working memory. Working memory refers to the active maintenance of information in the service of complex cognitive tasks such as problem solving and planning. The team of investigator with study how the unique demands placed on the working memory system shape its representations during learning and development, and how these representations affect the use of working memory by the cognitive system as a whole. Their primary source of insight into this process will come from a computational analysis, which will be used to integrate and explore relevant findings from neurobiology and developmental and adult cognition. The primary hypothesis is that to maintain information in an active state over delays and in the face of interference, working memory representations should be discrete. A discrete representation admits to only a finite set of possible states, rather than representing continuous states. For example, the integers from 1 to 100 form a discrete set, in contrast to the real numbers in this range. Discreteness imparts a measure of robustness to the representation because small amounts of "noise" can be overcome by interpreting an observed state as the nearest discrete stat. From the central property of discreteness, a number of other properties follow. For example, discrete representations should be more categorical, more easily verbalize, better for perceiving or performing a sequence of steps, and more accessible to awareness. All these properties have component of the proposed research is to explore the idea that they all follow from the more basic property of dicreteness. The initial goal of the project will be establish through experimental studies the validity of the hypothesis that working memory representations are indeed discrete. This will be done by exploring a key behavioral consequence of this hypothesis: working memory representations should be more categorical than other representations. This predicition will be investigated with a set of existing empirical paradigms that have elucidated variables that affect the working memory system, including developmental age, delay, dual-task demands, and brain damage. Working memory plays a central role in most accounts of complex human behavior, because working memory is required in any task that involves multiple stos ir a temporally extended focus of attention. This kinds of tasks are important and pervasive throughout society, including: economic, political, and military planning; air-traffic control; and scientific research, to name just a few. It is essential to understand the nature of the representations in the working memory system and to understand how people learn to use working memory in the service of complex behavior. This research will advance our knowledge in this important area, and may provide insight into techniques for rehabilitation of working memory following brain injury and techniques for assisting the development of working memory in children.

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


This collaborative project outlines a series of studies investigating the role of individual differences in executive functions (EFs) in expression of implicit racial bias. Executive functions refer to higher-order control processes that regulate thought and action. Although an individual's performance on laboratory-based implicit bias tasks is typically interpreted as a straightforward manifestation of his/her underlying automatic bias, recent preliminary evidence suggests that performance on all such tasks implicates executive control processes, such as the overriding of dominant or pre-potent responses. According to the team of researchers involved in this project, racial bias, as assessed by implicit bias tasks, is a complex construct jointly affected by automatic bias and individual differences in EF abilities. The research they will carry out seeks to vigorously test this emerging theoretical view by conducting a large-scale individual differences study of the relationship between EF abilities and expressions of racial bias. The aim of this research is threefold: to investigate the extent to which behavioral manifestations of race bias are associated with individual differences in related but separable EF abilities; to investigate several neurocognitive processes associated with cognitive control as mechanisms through which EF abilities affect expression of race bias; and to determine whether individual differences in EF abilities moderate the impact of manipulations that temporarily deplete executive functioning. The work will involve 5 collaborators and include nearly 500 research participants at three geographic locations. What sets this project apart theoretically from existing work is that rather than treating EF as a unitary ability, the current research adopts a multi-component view of EF that suggest it can be decomposed into correlated yet separable subcomponents, such as inhibition, updating, and shifting. By examining both behavioral and neurocognitive (ERP) indices of implicit bias, this project has the potential to provide the first-ever systematic and comprehensive analysis of the EF-bias relationship.

The proposed project is focused on the gender gap in the STEM disciplines through research on the impact of stereotype threat, which is viewed as an important factor in female underrepresentation in mathematics and science. Stereotype threat for women in math and science takes the form of a fear that they could be judged in light of negative stereotypes. The research rigorously tests the emerging view that identity threat impairs
learning and performance by reducing mental capacity, specifically working memory capacity, cluttering individuals? minds with negative task-irrelevant thoughts (e.g., worry) and inducing them to excessively monitor task performance. Affirmation is hypothesized to reduce task-irrelevant thoughts and/or excessive performance monitoring, thereby protecting working memory capacity from the effects of identity threat.

Using multiple levels of analysis, the research is designed to: a) test whether stereotype threat diminishes the math and science performance of undergraduate women by reducing working memory capacity; b) determine the efficacy of a self-affirmation intervention for lessening the negative impact of stereotype threat on women's math performance and clarify the underlying cognitive mechanism (i.e., depleted working memory capacity ) that allegedly mediates its impact; and c) examine whether a self-affirmation intervention can improve the learning of new scientific concepts in addition to enhancing the solving of math and science problems. A significant strength of this proposal is the proposed testing of working memory capacity in a more rigorous and comprehensive manner than previously done, by examining multiple mediating mechanisms with a diverse array of converging measures (e.g., reaction times, event-related potentials, heart rates.

The proposed research will yield rich data on underlying mechanisms that should provide a foundation for conducting larger-scale longitudinal interventions in actual STEM classrooms. The research also has the potential to advance knowledge and understanding across several fields and create transformative concepts

This project has the potential to significantly reduce the gender gap in STEM fields at the undergraduate and graduate levels through significantly reducing underrepresentation in these disciplines and increasing performance on standardized tests of math and science. At the same time, the proposed activities offer a unique blend of training opportunities to undergraduate trainees, graduate and post-grad students. The interdisciplinary team includes leading researchers with expertise in cognitive psychology, social neuroscience, and science education. Thus the project also can serve as a proof of concept that an interdisciplinary approach can reveal the mechanisms underlying one of the most significant psychological barriers to women's success in the STEM, and that a psychological intervention targeting identity threat can improve women's STEM learning and performance.

Abstract

The current project examines an important yet neglected factor in the learning of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) materials, namely, involuntary mind-wandering, or momentary attention lapses from external stimuli or events, such as texts or lectures. Although mind-wandering is highly prevalent during attempts at learning (as high as 40% of the time during typical classroom lectures), little research has been done to shed light on the potential influences of mind-wandering on STEM learning. To fill this gap in knowledge, the research team from two institutions (University of Colorado Boulder and University of North Carolina Greensboro) examines: (a) how mind-wandering affects learning and retention of STEM concepts; (b) how typical classroom behaviors (e.g., note-taking, media multitasking) influence mind-wandering during lectures, thereby affecting learning and retention; (c) whether interventions designed to decrease mind-wandering ultimately improve learning and retention; and (d) how individual differences in both cognitive and noncognitive variables influence mind-wandering and what sort of individuals are affected most (either positively or negatively) by typical classroom behaviors or designed interventions. Although this primarily laboratory research will focus on basic statistics learning among college students, the prevalence of mind-wandering across contexts makes this work relevant to other STEM disciplines as well, because STEM learning often builds directly on previously learned concepts and, hence, early learning failures may have a particularly severe negative cascading effect on subsequent learning.

The project takes a converging-operations approach, through a systematic series of laboratory-based experimental and individual-differences studies as well as a large-scale classroom observational study. Laboratory studies will assess STEM learning from realistic video lectures, during which students? in-the-moment thoughts are occasionally probed; moreover, rigorous individual-differences measurement of cognitive ability (i.e., executive functions), prior STEM knowledge, and STEM motivation, enables the assessment of their influences on mind-wandering and on learning. Lab-study manipulations will test the extent to which note-taking and multitasking affect students? attention to lectures and thereby influence learning. Laboratory interventions will attempt to decrease mind-wandering (and increase learning) by scaffolding attention or by increasing personal relevance of STEM material. The classroom-observation study will assess the extent to which personal relevance and attention-enhancing (or disrupting) classroom behaviors predict STEM course grades. Together, these studies will provide the first systematic and rigorous investigations into the effects of mind-wandering on STEM learning and retention.

Understanding the mechanisms and consequences of student mind-wandering in classrooms is crucial to developing interventions that maximize STEM learning. The proposed research will enable subsequent scaled-up, theoretically motivated interventions for not only STEM classrooms but also for on-line multimedia learning environments. Moreover, the focus on typical classroom behaviors (e.g., note-taking and media multitasking) and general underlying cognitive and motivational factors (e.g., executive functions, prior knowledge, and personal relevance) makes the findings and insights from the proposed research broadly relevant to many STEM (and non-STEM) disciplines. The proposed project will also provide unique training opportunities for undergraduate and graduate research assistants and a postdoctoral associate by teaching them to integrate experimental and psychometric methods and applying them to both laboratory and authentic classroom settings.

The ability to comprehend language is a hallmark of human intelligence. Although this ability seems to come effortlessly to neurologically normal adults, such ease belies a complex underlying network of neural processes. A major challenge in investigating the neural mechanisms of language comprehension is that people may not all process language in exactly the same way. People may vary substantially, for example, in the ease with which they can recognize words and in their abilities to hold in mind information about the preceding words and sentences. Given such individual differences, the mechanisms of language processing can be obscured if researchers adopt the common neuroimaging practice of averaging together brain activity from different people who have experienced the same stimuli (for example, the same word). With support from the National Science Foundation, Dr. Albert Kim and his colleague Dr. Akira Miyake will investigate the neural mechanisms of language comprehension with a focus on systematic differences between individuals. . Dr. Kim and Dr. Miyake will record brain electrical activity using electroencephalography (EEG) from the scalps of participants who are reading sentences, measuring event related potentials (ERPs) for each word in the sentences. They will incorporate recent advances in application of blind source separation (BSS) algorithm into this research to enable separation of fast brain electrical signals from different brain regions and enable characterization of individual differences in the neurobiology of language processing in ways that cannot be provided by fMRI based brain imaging.

Developmental disorders of language comprehension impede scholastic and professional success, and acquired language comprehension disorders, such as those following stroke, can be fundamentally debilitating. Thus, understanding the basic mechanisms of language processing is likely to be relevant to the diagnosis and treatment of disordered language. Because of the novelty of simultaneously measuring and comparing multiple measures of individual differences in language processes, this work has the potential to transform current research practices in the field. Dr. Kim and Dr. Miyake will maximize the broader impact of the work by organizing special journal issues in appropriate outlets and special workshops within national and international conferences. The goal of these special issues and workshops will be to assemble research in various areas in cognitive neuroscience (e.g., language, memory, attention, decision making) that illustrates the theoretical importance and viability of integrating individual differences analyses, neurocognitive theories, and modern analysis methods. Finally, because the proposed research involves multiple research methods and approaches, it will provide exceptionally rich training opportunities to the graduate students and undergraduate students who will be working on the project.