Fall "PsychNotes" newsletter available

The Fall 2009 issue of "PsychNotes," the department alumni newsletter, is now available online. Visit psych.indiana.edu/PsychNotesOnline to read the latest news about faculty, staff, alumni and current students.

Student honored by Society for Neuroscience

Sunah Kim, a graduate student who works with Tom James, received a graduate travel award at the 2009 Society for Neuroscience conference this month.

Winners are chosen based on the scientific merit of abstracts presented at the society's annual meeting. The award includes complimentary registration and a stipend to offset travel expenses for the event. For more information, visit www.sfn.org.

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.

IU cognitive scientists receive $3.1 million

Cognitive scientists at Indiana University Bloomington received a five-year, $3.1 million grant from the National Science Foundation to create and employ innovative methods for training future scientists.

According to the NSF, the Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship (IGERT) program is intended to "catalyze a cultural change in graduate education" with innovative new models for graduate education and training that transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries. IGERT also is "intended to facilitate diversity in student participation and preparation, and to contribute to a world-class, broadly inclusive, and globally engaged science and engineering workforce."

"This highly-competitive award is a strong recognition of the quality of the cognitive science program at IU Bloomington," said Randall Beer, principal investigator. Beer is professor of cognitive science and professor in the School of Informatics and Computing. "Building on our existing strengths in the psychological and brain sciences and complex systems, as well as our new activities in robotics, this award will allow us to offer a unique training program on situated, embodied and dynamical approaches to cognition."

IU Bloomington's program, one of 18 funded this year out of more than 400 initial proposals, will focus on the role that the interaction of an agent's body and environment with its brain plays in the production of behavior and cognition. The dominant approach in science consists of breaking things down into smaller and smaller components. The core motivation for the "dynamics of brain-body-environment interaction in behavior and cognition" IU training initiative is to not only decompose systems into their parts, but to compose these parts back together again to show how they interact to form a functioning and adaptive whole. The graduate students will receive training in a variety of methods, including computational simulations, mathematical analysis, experimental methods, robotics and neuroscience. The systems that they study will span many levels, from individual neurons, to neural circuits, to developing infants, to groups of people forming organizations.

Co-investigators include Robert Goldstone, director of the Cognitive Science Program; Linda Smith, Chancellor's Professor and chair of the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences; and Olaf Sporns, professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. The 20 faculty members participating in the program have appointments in the Cognitive Science Program, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, and Department of History and Philosophy of Science, in the College of Arts and Sciences; and the Department of Computer Science in the School of Informatics and Computing.

The new program will include courses and professional development activities, an extended colloquium series, domestic and international summer research internships, a summer program for undergraduate students from underrepresented groups, and an annual research showcase.

The first class of fellows will begin in the spring. They are Jennifer Trueblood, Paul Williams and Carlos Zednik, doctoral students in the cognitive science program; Skyler Place and Thomas Wisdom, doctoral students in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences who are working on joint degrees in cognitive science; and Richard Veale, doctoral student in computer science who is working on a joint degree in cognitive science.

Beer can be reached at rdbeer@indiana.edu. For more information about the program, visit http://mypage.iu.edu/~rdbeer/IGERTOverview.pdf.

Peter Finn competes in swimming championships

Professor Peter Finn recently competed in the U.S. Masters Swimming Long Course Nationals competition in Indianapolis.

Finn placed fourth nationally in the 50 and 100 meter breaststroke. His relay team won gold medals in the 200 and 400 medley relay events. The team also broke the national record in the 400 medley relay. Finn's team members were Joel Stager, professor of kinesiology, Gary Hall Sr., IU alumnus and three-time Olympian, and Ed Silva, IU alumnus and graduate of Bloomington High School South.

The event is supported by U.S. Masters Swimming, a group founded in 1970 to promote continued competition for former swimmers.

College "Themester" honors Charles Darwin

This fall, the College of Arts & Sciences will mark the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of his publication On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection with its first Themester, titled "Evolution, Diversity and Change."

For more information, visit themester.indiana.edu.

Undergraduate scholar Q&A

The Indiana University Scholarships Web site recently featured neuroscience major Tarlise Townsend and Psychology major Laura Englehardt.

Townsend, a Cox scholar, s also majoring in Germanic studies and minoring in mathematics and biology. She hopes to eventually attend graduate school in neuroscience.

Englehardt is pursuing another major in Spanish and a minor in human development and family studies. She plans to attend graduate school for psychology.

Phil Summers honored by freshman class

Professor Phil Summers was selected as the favorite professor of the 2009 freshman class of the honoraries Alpha Lambda Delta and Phi Eta Sigma, Indiana University Bloomington chapters.

The two academic honor societies for first-year students were founded in the early twentieth century. Summers received the most nominations from students who were initiated in Spring 2009.

Research at IU Bloomington, IU School of Medicine given $3 million boost

In 1979, Chancellor's Professor David Pisoni brought the first two postdoctoral researchers to Indiana University's campus when he was awarded a five-year training grant by the National Institute of Neurological and Communicative Disorders. Today, the same grant supports six postdoctoral researchers, six doctoral students and six medical students in Bloomington and Indianapolis.

The grant, now funded by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD), has received additional funding to continue through 2014--making it the longest existing training grant in NIDCD history. During the next six years, the NIDCD will provide more than $3 million for training in research concerning the use of sensory aids, such as cochlear implants and hearing aids.

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Colloquia this Friday

Looking for a talk (or talks!) to attend this Friday, April 3? Here are some options:

Rob Kling Center for Social Informatics talk

1:30 p.m. Friday, Wells Library 001

"Facing the flood of information in the supermarket: Helping shoppers make better choices"

Peter Todd, Indiana University

Informatics Colloquium

3 p.m., Informatics East 130 (New addition)

"From cellular networks to population disease patterns: A systems approach"

Natali Gulbahce, Havard School of Medicine/Northwestern University

Social Psychology Seminar

3:30 p.m., PY 128

"Image bite politics: News and the visual framing of elections"

Betsi Grabe, Indiana University

Animal Behavior Colloquium

4 p.m., Myers Hall 130

"Getting caught in peculiar positions: Variation in the mechanisms of monogamy"

Steven Phelps, University of Florida

For more upcoming events, visit psych.indiana.edu.

Scholars Day at Women's Basketball game Sunday

If you would like to represent the department at Scholars Day this Sunday, you can pick up a free shirt in PY 229 before 5 p.m. today.

At the game, all departments and organizations there for Scholars Day will meet in the south bleachers behind the pep band. Krystie Herndon, Scholars Day co-chair, will be there in her Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology shirt. Find her and let her know you're there to represent Psychological & Brain Sciences.

Well, you asked for it...

Participants from our last graduate school Facebook discussion and live chat have requested that we have another chat this semester. This would give all of our undergraduates one last chance this year to ask their final burning questions about choosing schools, attending graduate school and what to do if you don't get into your chosen school.

We're tentatively scheduling our next discussion for 7 p.m. to 11 p.m. Monday, April 13. More info to come. If you want to receive regular updates, become a fan on Facebook.

Last night's live chat

Thanks to all who attended the live chat yesterday evening. A transcript is available online: http://mypage.iu.edu/~porterjl/chat0204.html

Some of the topics discussed were:
- How many grad schools should I apply to?
- When will I hear back from schools?
- How can I find out information about the schools I'm applying to?
- How do I prepare for an interview or recruitment weekend?
- How can I find professors I'm interested in working with?
- How should I prepare for the GRE?

We need your input to make decisions about future discussions! Reply here, or take our online survey to give us some feedback about the chat and Facebook discussion:
https://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=rugWYU9PeU_2fK2APZ_2f1s4JA_3d_3d

Live chat for students and alumni

You may have seen a few notes on Facebook about the chat room we will host next Wednesday during our discussion group's target time. This was based on suggestions from those of you who took surveys after past discussions. In response to your suggestions, we now have a chat room available through Adobe Acrobat Connect. You will not need any software to enter--only a Flash reader for your browser, which most people already have.

Here are some additional instructions to help you:

- The chat room will open at 8:30 p.m. on Wednesday, February 4 at the following link: http://breeze.iu.edu/IUBPsychGrad
The same link will be used for future discussions, so please bookmark this page.

- We will still use the discussion board on the Facebook group page for the Q&A. Please post your questions there starting next Wednesday morning. We will try to copy these into the chat and address

- The chat function in Connect is very easy to use - just type in the chat window to join the discussion. There is also a drop-down menu at the bottom; you can choose to speak to the entire room, or send a private message to one person.

- There are also other functions of the chat room that we could potentially utilize, such as file sharing, so if at any point during the chat you would like to share a file with someone, we will attempt to give you that ability when it comes up.

- I will be on hand during most of the target time to help out, so feel free to message me through the chat room at any time or e-mail me at porterjl@indiana.edu.

We would like to have as many participants as possible to help us test out this new feature, so please drop by the chat room Wednesday.

2008-09 Psi Chi Alumni-Community Dinner

We will be hosting this year's Psi Chi Alumni-Community Dinner, hosted by the Psi Chi honors society and the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, at 6 p.m. Wednesday, March 11 in the University Club at the Union.

I'm seeking some local alumni, especially if you are a recent graduate, who would be able to come to the dinner and talk about careers with current undergraduate students. We're looking for individuals in various careers that would interest our students. The event is free of charge; it's an opportunity for you to give back to students, and for us to provide you with a delicious meal!

If you are interested in attending, please contact me with your name, address, phone number and current employment information. A formal invitation will be mailed to anyone interested, so even if you are not 100% you can attend, please respond.

Thanks!

Jenny Porter
Media & Event Coordinator
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences
Indiana University Bloomington