A Center for Cognitive, Social, Computational & Mathematical Neuroscience

University Of Maryland, College Park, College Park MD

Investigators

Abstract

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 This project is to renovate outdated laboratory suites in the Biology/Psychology Building on the campus of the University of Maryland - College Park to create the Joint Center for Cognitive,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.