Steven R. Quartz - US grants

Steven Quartz
BCS:0093757
The Mechanisms of Cognitive Development

This integrated research and education CAREER development program centers on a basic question: How do human cognitive skills emerge from the developing brain? In recent years, developmental cognitive neuroscience has begun to construct integrative frameworks that bring together neurobiology and psychology to begin to address this basic question. The addition of computational modeling has facilitated this integrative framework by offering promising tools to characterize the dynamics of development. This career development program will build on these advances in developmental cognitive neuroscience. Over five-years, it will integrate psychology, neurobiology, computational modeling, and robotics to create a neurocomputational framework for investigating human cognitive development. Specifically, this project has two major research components:

Constructive learning: An Investigation of the interplay between learning and neural development: Human cognitive development rests on a complex interaction between biological mechanisms and processes of learning. This research component will construct a computational framework to investigate how learning guides the construction of the brain circuits underlying human cognitive function. With this framework, it will be possible to address such critical questions as: What are the neural substrates of cognitive development, what processes regulate their development, and how does change at the neural level correspond to change at the cognitive and behavioral level? To investigate these issues, this framework will be applied to a variety of cognitive developmental phenomena, including Piagetian developmental tasks, the development of executive function, and outstanding issues in developmental plasticity.

Active development: A computational investigation of midbrain dopamine systems in the development of executive function: Converging evidence suggests that midbrain dopamine systems constitute a behavioral system that fuels the child's active exploration, a critical but poorly understood component of development. This research will apply a computational model of midbrain dopamine projections to the development of human executive function, which underlies flexible behavior. Specifically, this project will construct a computational framework to investigate the crucial but poorly understood developmental links between dopaminergic systems and prefrontal cortex in the emergence of working memory, behavioral inhibition, and executive function.

This research will develop alongside both an undergraduate and graduate educational program that will include the creation of a new graduate program in Cognition in the Computational and Neural Systems Program at the California Institute of Technology. Caltech has recently made a strong commitment to fostering interdisciplinary research and education in the cognitive and behavioral sciences, making it an ideal environment in which to pursue this career development plan.

This Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) award supports the development of a multidisciplinary graduate training program in Brain, Mind, and Society. Its purpose is to provide students with the analytical foundations and the experimental skills needed to pursue scientific careers at the intersection of neuroscience and the social sciences, who are capable of integrating neural, psychological, and economic approaches to attack basic and applied problems related to valuation, human decision making, and social exchange. Trainees will take a rigorously designed, largely team-taught course sequence, spanning from nervous system organization and function to mathematical models of decision making and social exchange. This coursework will be complemented by equal balance in cross-disciplinary laboratory research, thereby tightly integrating research training with scholarship to create true intellectual hybrids across both disciplines.
The Brain, Mind, and Society program emphasizes the inclusion of highly qualified underrepresented students through a four-tiered outreach program, Science Matters, involving a team-based mentorship program bringing together students from the this program, underrepresented undergraduate students at Cal State University, Los Angeles and underrepresented high school students in Los Angeles' Belmont Schools. The resulting diversity of the program's collaborative teams will reflect the program's broader impact in five key social application areas, which may ultimately provide a new scientifically-enriched discourse to help us understand critical social problems, in economic, therapeutic, educational, philosophical, and business and political applications. IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating U.S. Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the interdisciplinary background, deep knowledge in a chosen discipline, and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to catalyze a cultural change in graduate education by establishing innovative new models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries.