Shiffrin awarded for excellence

Professor Richard Shiffrin recently won the 2009 Henry R. Besch, Jr. Promotion of Excellence Award from the Indiana University Alliance of Distinguished and Titled Professors. The award recognizes outstanding service at Indiana University.

One of Shiffrin's many service contributions to IU includes being the founding co-director of the Alliance. Additional local services include being founding director of the Cognitive Science Program and charing the committee to form a School of Informatics (now called Informatics and Computing) at Indiana University.

Faculty members to judge Cardboard Boat Regatta

Faculty members Phil Summers and Lisa Thomassen will be judges for the Council for Advancing Student Leadership's 9th Annual Carboard Boat Regatta. The event takes place at 4 p.m. Friday, Sept. 25, at the IU Outdoor Pool at 17th Street and Fee Lane.

The Cardboard Boat Regatta will feature boats made solely of cardboard and duct tape, racing the length of the pool. The top three fastest teams will receive awards, and special awards will go to the most creative votes.

Teams must register by 5 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 23, to participate. For more information, click here.

Department team No. 1 in Alzheimer's walk

The Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences team for the 2009 Alzheimer's Association Memory Walk is ranked No. 1 in fundraising. The walk takes place Saturday, Sept. 26 in Bryan Park.

Thanks to staff members and fundraisers Char Wozniak and Patricia Crouch, the team has raised a total of $1,250 for this event. Click here to join the team.

NIH grant awarded to study risk-taking

Assistant Professor Joshua Brown has received a two-year $683,736 grant from the National Institutes of Health for a project aimed at understanding how certain parts of the brain learn to predict the outcome of one's own actions.

The project, which will use fMRI technology and sophisticated computational neural models, will focus on risk-taking. Some individuals, Brown said, are very sensitive to the possibility of making a mistake and will avoid risky behavior. Others, he said, engage in risky behavior such as drug-taking and unprotected sex despite the consequences.

"Our research explores how the brain learns to predict moment-by-moment the possible consequences of behavior, whether good or bad, and how those areas contribute to better decision-making in risky situations," Brown said.

The two-year award is funded through the NIH's National Institute on Drug Abuse, with funds from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

"We have found specific parts of the brain that detect and help avoid risky behavior," Brown said. "In substance dependent individuals, those brain areas are pretty much asleep at the wheel, so individuals look for pleasure no matter the risks involved."

Brown expects that his research will one day lead to a better understanding and better treatment for substance dependence.

Brown's research interests focus on the frontal lobes of the brain, exploring how people and animals learn, optimize and control goal-directed behavior in complex and changing environments. These abilities involve reinforcement learning, planning, prediction, expectation, evaluation and sequential ordering of movements, in addition to complex sensory processing. For more information about Brown's Cognitive Control Lab, visit http://www.indiana.edu/~cclab.