4 science & research
Study explores methods of rule-making Researchers use EEG monitoring to determine how people structure new information By JASON NADBOY STAFF WRITER
“People like to build rules, even when rules don’t necessarily apply,” said James Cavanagh, a former postdoctoral fellow at Brown and assistant professor of psychology at the University of New Mexico. Cavanagh and several colleagues recently published a study in the Journal of Neuroscience about how humans apply rules and strategies to tasks they have to complete, using new technology to analyze the data they collected. The researchers were the first ever to be successful in creating a computer algorithm to recognize specific patterns in electroencephalography data, which was used to analyze neural activity as participants completed tasks, Cavanagh said. According to electrophysiological data, the prefrontal cortex was activated when the participants were learning the initial task, wrote Michael Frank, associate professor of cognitive, linguistic and psychological sciences, in an email to The Herald. The prefrontal cortex is “particularly involved in executive functions, or cognitive control, that allows us to make more complex choices by taking into account contexts, past events, goals, information in working memory, etc.,” wrote Anne Collins, a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences, in an email to The Herald. “This study showed that people tend to construct abstract rules even when it is not needed in a task, but that this allowed
» BRAZIL, from page 1 promoting transparency and collaboration between the countries, he added. Pagliarini accompanied the team to the Archives last summer to enter the documents online and will lead a group to the Archives again this summer to complete the digitization of documents. Researchers and students at Brown and Brazilian universities have already begun analyzing some of the documents, using them to study topics such as the United States’ stance on Brazilian military policies and instances of torture, Green said. In order to transfer the State
them to then generalize the rules to new tasks,” Frank wrote. In the study, participants were shown sets of shapes and colors on a computer and had to learn to press the correct button associated with the particular figure. “There were just four different buttons on the keyboard, … and they aren’t told which is correct but have to learn by just trying out different buttons for each shape and getting feedback that tells them if they are right or wrong,” Frank wrote. Next, the participants completed two more sets with different colored shapes. In the first additional set of tasks, participants could use rules they created to their advantage to successfully finish the tasks. But in the following set, these rules stymied participants’ efforts to select the right button. EEGs connected to participants’ heads allowed researchers to collect data on what parts of the brain were activated during the experiment. The researchers collected data from 35 participants in the study. Throughout the sets, “it’s very clear that people do develop rules to help them,” Cavanagh said, adding that participants naturally created rules even when they did not turn out to help. “It’s probably because it’s most often a rewarding strategy: Structuring new information helps us to simplify it when possible, and to generalize it,” Collins wrote. For the study, the team of researchers had to develop an algorithm to understand the EEG data, Cavanagh said. “We trained an algorithm to notice when people were attending to color and to shapes.” The program was difficult to make because each person uses different neural networks in his brain when recognizing shapes or colors, he said. “It took quite
a few months to get these algorithms to be bias-free.” Since the algorithm is a new application of technology, researchers were surprised by how successful it turned out to be in recognizing patterns, Cavanagh said. “What is particularly striking about this result is that (the researchers) were able to decode the rule structures that different people had constructed,” said David Badre, assistant professor of cognitive, linguistic and psychological sciences, who was not involved with the study. The researchers could even use this structure to “predict how well (participants) would generalize that rule to a new task,” he added. This study may hold a lot of potential for future research and discovery in learning and memory. “We will try to understand better what benefits come from structuring what we learn, to figure out what constrains how we structure it and to observe more precisely how the brain creates that structure,” Collins wrote. Collins and her team began this study in 2011. “We have already conducted pilot experiments for future investigations, and are hoping to publish more results within a year,” she added. The team’s research on how the brain creates a series of rules to respond to varied contexts could “eventually inform the types of strategies that are used when teaching new skills,” Frank wrote. It could even help “encourage those who are less likely to engage this system” to develop a systematic approach to learning. The individual differences in rules participants made “may help us explain how people differ in their ability to successfully adapt to novelty in their everyday lives, as well as better understanding neurological and psychiatric disorders that compromise this ability,” Badre said.
Department documents from paper to the Internet, a small group of undergraduates traveled to the National Archives, Green said. The students scanned the papers and then indexed them in an online catalog. Digital records are the future of archiving, Waters wrote. Paper documents are not sustainable because they age and can be damaged, so digitization provides an easy-access alternative, he added. The Brazil Initiative aims to “make Brown the best place to study Brazil outside of Brazil” and to strengthen the University as a hub of international research collaborations about the country, Green said. The University held a conference
last week titled “Brazil: From Dictatorship to Democracy,” which highlighted many of the same historical events that are covered in the documents, Green said. The Opening the Archives team plans to release another 10,000 documents in the coming year, Green said. Student participants will travel to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston and the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library and Museum in Austin, Texas, to continue to unveil the diplomatic history between the two countries. “It’s part of preserving and indexing history,” Green said.
THE BROWN DAILY HERALD WEDNESDAY, APRIL 16, 2014
Science & Research Roundup BY SARAH PERELMAN, SCIENCE & RESEARCH EDITOR
Drug addiction takes similar form as AIDS epidemic Today’s epidemic of addiction to opioid drugs bears a striking likeness to the early years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and efforts to deal with the problem can be improved through similar interventions, according to a report by a team including two University researchers. The study was published online in advance of print release in the American Journal of Medicine. Just like HIV/AIDS patients, people suffering from addiction tend to be young and previously healthy individuals, and their care has been influenced by a public perception that only certain groups are affected, according to the report. Though the death toll from unintentional drug overdoses is similar to that from the HIV/AIDS epidemic, so far the response to opioid dependency — the United States’ fastest-growing drug problem — has been less effective, according to a Lifespan press release. The rise of HIV/AIDS 30 years ago prompted an unusual public health response, which focused on human rights and included not only biomedical advances but also community advocacy and activism, the researchers noted in the report. The study’s authors, which included Traci Green, assistant professor of emergency medicine and epidemiology, and Josiah Rich, professor of medicine and epidemiology, called for a similar multi-pronged approach to addressing the addiction and overdose epidemic. They recommended increased education for the medical community, better access to evidence-based treatment, reformulation of pain medications and broader access to the drug naloxone, which can reverse overdose.
Hot mantle areas cause high midocean ridges Temperature differences deep in the Earth’s mantle control the height of mid-ocean ridges, the vast mountain ranges snaking along the ocean floor, according to a report published April 4 in the journal Science. Researchers led by Colleen Dalton, assistant professor of geological sciences, set out to determine why some mid-ocean peaks remain miles below the ocean’s surface while others have higher elevations, even rising above the water level in places like Iceland, according to a University press release. Researchers looked at speeds of seismic waves caused by hundreds of earthquakes and compared that data to information on elevation and rock chemistry. They found that hotter temperatures in the Earth’s mantle led to higher ridges, while areas with cooler mantle temperatures had lower peaks, according to the press release. “It is clear from our results that what’s being erupted at the ridges is controlled by temperature deep in the mantle,” Dalton said in the release. “It resolves a long-standing controversy and has not been shown definitively before.” The composition of the magma forming the ridges was less important in determining the peaks’ height, the release said.
Africana studies graduate student wins year-long fellowship
Nicosia Shakes GS will travel to Jamaica to spend a year exploring how theater can inspire women to engage in grassroots projects, according to a University press release. She received the Inter-American Foundation Grassroots Development Field Research Fellowship, which will fund her research at the Institute for Gender and Development Studies Regional Coordinating Unit at the University of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica. The organization awards fellowships to graduate students who have conducted high-level thesis research in the areas of physical sciences, social sciences or other disciplines related to developmental studies in Latin America and the Caribbean, according to the group’s website. Shakes’ project, entitled “Mobilizing Women through Performance in Jamaica: A Study of Sistren Theatre Collective,” will be incorporated into her dissertation. Her research has also explored the Garvey movement and Pan-Africanism and the ways political ideology can be expressed through creative arts, according to her Brown research page. Congress founded the IAF in 1969 to provide development help to citizens of poorer areas of Latin America and the Caribbean or interest groups seeking to support them. The organization offers fellowships in collaboration with the Institute of International Education, according to the IAF website.