Michael J. Kane - US grants

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Executive functions (EFs) are general-purpose brain mechanisms that allow for self-regulated thought and behavior, and they are critical to intelligence and mental health. However, despite their importance, EFs are poorly understood. Our first goal is to better understand the cognition underlying EFs and EF deficits;we therefore propose a large-scale laboratory study that tests for individual differences in several elemental EF abilities (involving control of attention and memory) using multiple tasks that are tractable and theoretically grounded enough to suggest underlying brain mechanisms. Our second goal is to better understand how particular EF deficits contribute to daily-life functioning and development of mental-health disorders, such as schizophrenia. We address this in two ways. First, the laboratory EF study will also measure schizotypy-a multifaceted aspect of personality reflecting mild schizophrenic-like symptoms that heightens risk of later developing schizophrenic disorders. Second, an experience-sampling study of these same participants will question them at random intervals in their daily lives to assess cognitive and emotional experiences and to test whether the lab measures of EF and schizotypy predict particular mental and behavioral problems in everyday living. The specific aims of the proposed research are: 1) To assess the psychological structure of EF capabilities that reflect the control of working memory (maintaining and updating mental representations), the control of attention (sustaining and constraining conscious focus amid distraction), and the control of action (restraining habitual but inappropriate responses), and to assess their prediction of schizotypy in a large structural equation modeling study. 2) To illuminate the functional significance of EF and schizotypy in a large experience-sampling study that uses a daily-life "beeper" method to test how EF abilities measured in the laboratory moderate some of the cognitive and emotional problems experienced by schizotypic adults, such as confusion, distraction, paranoia, disturbing thoughts, social dysfunction, and communication difficulties. The proposed research is innovative in integrating the expertise of cognitive, social, and clinical psychologists and in combining laboratory, individual-differences, and ecological-sampling methods to clarify the nature of EFs, to determine the EF dimensions that predict schizotypy, and to evaluate the impact of EF and schizotypy differences on mental functioning as it unfolds in daily life. This will have a significant impact on our measurement and understanding of the brain's EFs and their contributions to serious psychopathology. PUBLIC HEALTH RELEVANCE: Executive functions-the brain mechanisms allowing for self-regulation of behavior, emotion, and thought- vary in effectiveness from person to person and are disrupted in many mental-health disorders, including AD/HD and schizophrenia. The proposed research will advance the basic science of executive functions as well as illuminate the role that individual differences in executive function play in schizotypy, a collection of personality characteristics that significantly predict risk for developing schizophrenia and a variety of daily-life impairments.

Increasing the number of US university students who successfully complete degrees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and enter the STEM workforce is of national importance. However, this has proven to be surprisingly difficult, especially with women and underrepresented minorities. A primary reason is that the students most likely to drop out of STEM disciplines, and therefore most in need of help, benefit least from innovations that merely address teaching quality or curriculum content. Research shows that we must influence students' self-efficacy: their belief in their own ability to overcome setbacks and ultimately succeed. This project will develop, test, document, and publicize a practical, inexpensive, single-session intervention to improve students' self-efficacy. It is suitable for inclusion in any university STEM course. Our test population will be 440 STEM majors taking introductory physics at UNCG and NCA&T, both universities having particularly large minority and/or female enrollments.

The project builds on two strong, but previously separate, lines of research into attitudinal/affect variables that influence student success. The first is "attributional retraining", in which students learn to attribute their successes and failures to internal rather than external factors. The second is "mindset" about fixed vs. growable intelligence, in which students learn that the brain remains plastic throughout life and that they can, with conscious effort and attention to thinking skills and strategies, become smarter. Interventions of demonstrated efficacy exist for each of these two, but none exist that address both concurrently, and none are suitable and practical for widespread use in university-level STEM instruction. In addition to developing a disseminable intervention and documenting its effectiveness, this project will develop procedures for efficiently and reliably gauging STEM students' self-efficacy (with extant instruments), and will advance our theoretical understanding of self-efficacy, its components, and its growth dynamics.