This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
This project is to renovate outdated laboratory suites in the Biology/Psychology Building on the campus of the University of Maryland - College Park to create the Joint Center for Cognitive, Social, Computational, and Mathematical Neuroscience. The Center will include shared laboratory space designed to support brain imaging, eye-tracking, computationally intensive data analysis, and collaborative research in neuroscience. The facility will be used by 50-60 researchers, including the faculty of the Psychology Department, their postdoctoral researchers, research assistants, graduate and undergraduate students, and collaborators from across the campus and partner institutions.
The combination of shared and dedicated laboratory facilities in the Joint Center is designed to bring together researchers and students in various disciplines who have overlapping interests and use overlapping methodologies. The unique, multidisciplinary arrangement will enable researchers to work side-by-side using shared imaging, electrophysiological, eye-tracking, digital coding, and computational facilities and reach a level of synergy and collaboration that is well beyond what normally occurs in individual laboratories. Areas of research that will be enabled by the Joint Center include cognitive development, judgment and decision processes, visual processes, emotion and affective processes, and social and cross-cultural processes. Specifically the Joint Center will support research projects such as examining the efficacy of cognitive training for improving cognitive functioning, studying the neural mechanisms involved in object recognition and suppression of background clutter, examining the culture-specific effect, if any, on fundamental judgment and decision processes which are most relevant to global conflict and cooperation, and exploring the relationship between attention and physiological processes and social relations such as infant attachment at both the behavioral and neural levels.
The Joint Center will have a tremendously positive impact on the quality of research and research training at the University of Maryland and will serve as a model for future collaborative centers devoted to behavioral and brain research. The Joint Center will also facilitate undergraduate education and outreach efforts to improve diversity within the university and the affected scientific fields. The Joint Center design and layout will greatly increase the ability of the university to integrate education and research in psychology through undergraduate honors research, as well as to provide undergraduate research opportunities to local colleges and universities with significant numbers of students from underrepresented groups. Space will be reserved in the Joint Center to support a research partnership with faculty from Morgan State University and their students.
The renovation completed funded by this Academic Research Infrastructure Program: Recovery and Reinvestment (ARI-R²) grant has yielded numerous important outcomes, both intellectually and more broadly. At the intellectual or scientific level, the renovation has created a research environment and a network of laboratories that fosters collaboration among students, faculty and researchers who work in overlapping areas, but otherwise would not be much in contact with each other. Old laboratories that were poorly designed for modern research have been reconfigured and repurposed in support of research in various domains within cognitive, social, computational and mathematical neuroscience. Examples follow: A program of research aimed at developing and implementing internet-based non-language-reliant methods (therefore capable of being widely administered) for understanding the role of working memory in a wide range of behavioral tasks is well under way. Phase 1, establishing reliability and validity of a set of tasks within the lab is completed and Phase 2, establishing these characteristics for the tasks when administered broadly via the web, is in process. A program of research aimed at understanding cross-cultural negotiation, conflict and collaboration between participants living in and participating from different cultures is now up and running. An early result using participants in the U.S. and in Turkey found support for the hypothesis that intercultural disputes are better resolved using forceful mediation styles, with further results clarifying the relationship between mediation style and dispute difficulty markers. Programs of research on cognitive and social development are active in the new facility. As an example, researchers showed that 3-year-old children demonstrated better memory for sequences of actions when they observed a person performing the sequence than when they observed the sequence occurring ambiguously. But more importantly, using a form of brain recording called EEG (electroencephalography), the researchers showed corresponding differences in brain function during the memory search process. Another very active program combines behavioral and brain imaging methodologies to study the interaction of cognition, motivation and emotion. Experiments recently completed reveal task and stimulus conditions during which reward and threat trade-off against each other across multiple sites within the brain. Such interactions are suggestive of competitive processes and may reflect the organization of opponent systems in the brain. The broader outcomes are in terms of the educational and outreach opportunities that the renovated laboratory provides. The new facility provides undergraduate and high school students with first-class hands-on training opportunities in all the domains that are represented within the various labs. The labs are committed to recruiting underrepresented and minority students for these training experiences. In addition to recruiting among the University of Maryland undergraduate student body, we also have implemented outreach programs to HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) in conjunction with the UMD College of Behavioral and Social Science’s Summer Research Initiative to provide their undergraduates with internships in the labs. In the past year, we supported three interns from HBCUs (Morgan State University, Morehouse College and Howard University) in addition to undergraduates from our own campus.
