BCS-0213666
Richard
E. Pastore
SUNY Binghamton
Human Cognition and Perception Program
The footfalls and
hoof beats in a western movie supply crucial realism to the moviegoer.
Things that make noise are tightly woven into the fabric of human experience.
It may come as somewhat of a surprise then that we know very little about
the actual perception of auditory events. This is true despite our extensive
knowledge of how ears work, for example, and extensive knowledge about
basic auditory capabilities of ourselves and other animals. Basic knowledge
of auditory event perception is necessary for the development of auditory
virtual-reality capabilities; the development of effective surveillance
systems for research, commercial, and military use; and to identify how
listening skills may be improved with training and which attributes of
sounds are most important to aid the hearing impaired. The NSF funded
basic research will accomplish the crucial first step to make such applications
possible. This first step is possible, because the acoustic properties
of auditory events reflect physical and biomechanical properties of their
sources. The impact of a shoe on a wooden floor will sound differently
than the same shoe on a metal floor, for example. Richard Pastore and
his colleagues will identify the physical and biomechanical properties
of source events and the relations between these source properties and
the acoustic properties of the resulting sound. With this database in
hand, they can conduct experiments to identify the sound attributes that
listeners correctly (or incorrectly) associate with source properties.
The goal is a “source-sound-perception approach” that may be used to study
perception of almost any auditory event.
SES-0214574
Trisha Van Zandt
Mario
Peruggia
Ohio State University
Methodology, Measurement, and Statistics Program and Human Cognition and
Perception Program
This research, conducted
by mathematical psychologist Trisha Van Zandt and statistician Mario Peruggia
of Ohio State University, will develop Bayesian models for chronometric
data, particularly human response time data. Pragmatically, response
times are important for evaluating human performance in many areas. They
assist machine interface design decisions, such as the optimal way to
present information to a pilot or the
best location for a turn-signal indicator. They also are used
in medicine; diagnoses of some organic brain disorders such as Alzheimer's
disease or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder can be informed by
a patient's response times on certain kinds of tests. Theoretically,
response times are used to test hypotheses about cognitive structure,
the ways in which people use and process information, and how changes
in the environment influence human behavior.
Although Bayesian
techniques are well established in other fields, social and behavioral
scientists rarely use them because they require a considerable investment
in computational resources as well as additional statistical training.
This project will develop a number of strategies that will improve the
analysis of response time data, including analyses that consider theories
about how response times are produced and new procedures that can help
untrained practitioners use Bayesian
methods with relatively little additional effort. The study also
undertakes a program of education and dissemination to improve the overall
quality of statistical analyses of response time data. Van Zandt and Peruggia
plan to incorporate the results of this research into their classes, involve
undergraduates in the research process, and provide tutorials and workshops
for basic training of Bayesian methods to social and behavioral science
researchers. Thus, this project will result in more accurate characterization
of response time data and therefore improved decision making about human
capabilities and disease.
BCS-9729103
Richard E. Nisbett
University
of Michigan
Human Cognition and Perception Program
East Asians are held
to reason holistically, attending to the context or ‘embedding field’
in which objects and events appear. They attribute causality to interactions
between the object (person, animal, or thing) and the embedding field.
There is no tradition of “western style” formal logic in East Asia. There
is a preference, instead, for dialectical reasoning in which opposing
facts or points of view are resolved. Europeans are held to be analytic,
attempting to discern preoperties of the object, and attibuting causality
to such properties. Scholars in many fields believe that different cultures
breed different styles of reasoning. Richard Nisbett’s research provided
a rigorous test of these beliefs. The following short list of topics
and findings illustrate the larger set of outcomes in this research:
1) Attention
& Perception: Participants are shown realistic underwater scenes
and report what they have seen. Japanese usually mention first the environment
whereas Americans mention first the focal object. Japanese mention many
more details about the environment and relations involving inert aspects
of the environment than do Americans.
2) Causal Analysis:
Americans tend to think that a person’s disposition must be the source
of their behavior, even when it is elicited by the environment—the Fundamental
Attribution Error. Asians appear to be more sensitive to contextual
and environmental cues. On the other hand, Asians tend to believe mistakenly
that they knew all along that some outcome would occur—a Hindsight
Bias error—which may be due, in part, to the same tendency that makes
the attribution error less likely for Asians.
3) Relationships
vs. Categories: Chinese participants find word pairs to be more 'closely
associated' when they are linked via a relationship (bus-passenger) than
when they are members of the same category (bus-car). The reverse tends
to be true for American participants.
4) Logic
vs. Dialecticism: Americans tend to think one of two contradictory
arguments must be correct and actually are more persuaded by the more
plausible of the two arguments than if it had been presented alone. Chinese
are actually more persuaded of the less plausible of the two arguments
if it is contradicted than if it is presented alone. When both are presented,
Chinese choose the 'middle way,' accepting both arguments equally, a tendency
that is different from that of the Americans but equally dubious on normative
grounds.
Apparently, East
Asian and Western thought differ substantially. The two mentalities are
embedded in different beliefs about the nature of the universe and how
we may know about the universe. Nisbett’s findings raise serious questions
about the universality of mental processes commonly regarded as basic—psychologists
have not correctly identified the `fault lines` of cognition. These findings
also suggest that there may be different styles of learning that should
be taken into consideration when teaching members of different groups;
and they provide evidence that cultural diversity of work groups has advantages
for problem-solving. Finally, the results are relevant to understanding
interaction between Asians and Americans in business and government contexts:
The two groups are likely to have different and potentially conflicting
understandings of the motives underlying behavior.
BCS-0214260
Neil E. Berthier
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Human Cognition and Perception Program
Adult humans possess
a remarkable capacity to use their hands to manipulate objects in the
world. Almost no other animals exhibit such dexterity. Remarkably, manual
dexterity involves the coordination of a vast number of muscles of the
trunk, arm, and hand—a control problem that is well beyond what we can
do with control artificial devices such as robot arms. Dexterity does
not appear fully formed in adults; however, it requires a protracted period
of development that starts soon after birth. Neil Berthier will conduct
three years of research to examine how infants develop a capacity for
dexterous manual reaching and how experience improves dexterity. The
NSF-funded project uses mathematical models of neural and muscular systems
to describe how one generates arm movements. Behavioral experiments will
test the model’s predictions against the actual abilities of human infants.
Other behavioral experiments will focus on the role of attentive vision
for control of reaching. This research will lead to a better understanding
of how reaching and manual dexterity develop, and may also shed light
on more general processes of human development. Furthermore, the models
used are closely related to current schemes for control of reaching by
robots. Thus the funded research may suggest novel approaches to the
problem of robot control.
BCS-0233482
Carol Espy-Wilson
University
of Maryland, College Park
Linguistics Program
Carol Espy-Wilson
will study a knowledge-based speech recognition system’s performance in
noise. The research is linguistically motivated, in that it seeks acoustic
correlates of linguistic features. This project emphasizes two components
of the Espy-Wilson’s larger research agenda: (1) analysis of signal representation
to ensure its robustness, and (2) application of a neural model to enhance
the signal-to-noise ratio before or during the extraction of a knowledge-based
speech signal representation. The broader impacts of the project lie in
its progress towards speaker-independent speech recognition, which has
practical applications in industry, education and speech rehabilitation.
BCS-0212134
Lawrence W. Barsalou
Emory
University
Human Cognition and Perception Program
Abstract cognitive
activities such as language and reasoning are grounded in the situated
everyday workings of the body—thus the terms situated cognition
or embodied cognition. For example, our knowledge of cars reflects
how we interact with cars, what it is like to actually drive a car; to
see, hear, touch, and smell a real car; or to feel an emotional response
to a car. This innovative, somewhat risky working hypothesis will be
explored by Lawrence Barsalou, who was recently was appointed Fellow of
the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. This view, which he shares
with a growing number of Cognitive scientists, contrasts with a tradition
whereby our knowledge of the world is assumed to be fully abstract and
detached—something like the “centralized” one-kind-of-knowledge-structure-fits-all
way in which a computer program can be written.
In the funded research,
human participants will perform classic “knowledge tasks,” responding
to questions such as “What are the properties of a car?” or “Is a tire
a property of a car?” Carefully controlled laboratory experiments have
been designed around such questions and tasks to assess whether situated
and embodied forms of knowledge are used to perform them. Support for
the working hypothesis could motivate big changes, a fundamental shift,
in how we think about ourselves. Moreover, this research should have
a broad applied impact in education (i.e., how best to teach a knowledge
domain) and cognitive engineering (i.e., how machines should be designed
to best interact with human beings). Finally, this work may suggest new
forms of artificial intelligence. Intelligent machines that use situated
knowledge, shaped around their peripheral devices, are more robust than
traditional centralized intelligent machines. Possible new machines could
resemble the robots used in exploration of Mars, for example, a second-generation
of robots that better situate themselves in their environments.
BCS-0214549
Daniel L. Schwartz
Stanford University
Human Cognition and Perception Program
Action facilitates
imagination. Suppose you close your eyes and pull a string from a spool
that, you believe, turns a miniature merry-go-round resting on top. As
a consequence, you may also better imagine the movement of objects placed
on the merry-go-round, like the benches or horses. The spool example
illustrates two central claims: (1) timing of bodily action facilitates
spatial imagination about the consequences of tool use; and, (2) knowledge
of a physical situation controls how timing influences a spatial inference.
In the research, participants must picture themselves in a different location
to judge the position of two objects with respect to each other. This
judgment is facilitated by rotating a map by hand (with eyes closed).
The proposed studies include various devices for turning the map at different
rates: People may tap a lever that turns the map a few or many degrees
at a time; they may turn a steering wheel clockwise, to make the map rotate
counter-clockwise; or, they may turn an imaginary map in their hands,
as though they were holding a map, although they know that they are not.
The studies will clarify the significance of timing in action and the
knowledge and beliefs that couple action and inferences about changing
spatial relations. The
ability to use complex tools and imagine their consequences is a uniquely
human ability. Most aspects of life include tool use. To understand
how tool use and imagination are intertwined is to understand a fundamental
aspect of human ability. Because it speaks directly to imagination, this
work will supply a partial explanation of invention—how we may imagine
the potential of novel tools. It also speaks to the learning, use, and
transfer of knowledge about complex physical tools. Likewise the imaginative
component speaks to development and application of virtual environments
in which bodily motions are not actually physically connected to outcomes.
Another application of this work would be for training in the use of tools,
as in medical practice, for example, where a tool is not directly in view,
as in orthoscopic surgery. But, perhaps, the most interesting implication
of this work is how the use of hands-on materials may teach abstract ideas
to children.
BCS-0113962
Joel Sherzer
Anthony
Woodbury
Mark McFarland
University of Texas
Linguistics Program (ITR Small Grant)
Latin
America hosts a great diversity of indigenous languages, but many of these
languages are in danger of extinction. By creating a linguistic archive,
anthropologists Joel Sherzer, Anthony Woodbury and Mark McFarland are
ensuring that these languages will be documented. The Archive of the
Indigenous Languages of Latin America (AILLA) is a web-accessible database
of audio and textual data featuring naturally occurring discourse. Scholars,
students, and indigenous people are able to access the AILLA database
using their web browsers, search and browse the contents of the database,
and download audio and text files from the database onto their own computers,
which they can then listen to or read immediately, using free, downloadable
software. AILLA archives primarily unpublished and previously unavailable
audio recordings and texts, and both preserve them and make them easily
accessible by creating a centralized and organized repository of digitized
copies of these materials. By developing and implementing the database
and web-browser interface, these anthropologists created a robust information
infrastructure for use by researchers, students, and indigenous peoples.
In addition, AILLA features: search tools for comparative, typological,
and historical research on language; language data related protocols including
a metadata scheme, data structures, and applications; and standards and
tools to address ethical issues of privacy and intellectual property rights
for language materials on the web. The fundamental goal is to create an
infrastructure for distributed scholarship in language-related disciplines
concerned with indigenous Latin America.
In addition to making
data available for basic research, AILLA will provide a wide range of
data for use in teaching courses in anthropology, linguistics, and other
language-related fields. It will facilitate the interchange of data between
Latin American, North American, and European scholars and between scholars
and indigenous communities, and will form an important new link in the
network of people working with the indigenous languages of Latin America.
AILLA will also be a resource for indigenous communities working to preserve,
maintain, and revitalize their languages.
http://www.ailla.org/
BCS-0091903
William
Dressler
The University of Alabama
Cultural Anthropology Program
In research on the
social and cultural factors contributing to individual adjustment (as
measured by both physical and psychological indices of well-being), William
W. Dressler and his associates are examining a variety of different factors
in research in southern Brazil. One of these is the relationship between
the individual and his or her cultural environment. The question here
is the extent to which an individual must adopt the beliefs and values
of his or her own society in order to function effectively in that society.
Of the variety of domains that define the cultural environment, one that
they are examining is national identity. Is there a broadly shared model
of what it means to be “Brazilian,” and must individuals adopt those beliefs
and values to function effectively in society (as assessed by their physical
and psychological well-being)? Fig. 1 represents major concepts that
people use to talk about being a Brazilian. People tend to group these
into three broad clusters. The first is the Brazil that most of the world
knows: the Brazil of carnival, samba, fun and futebol (soccer).
The second is the Brazil that is less well-known outside the country,
and represents the serious and hard-working side of Brazilian national
identity. The third represents a side of Brazil that many people in the
country dislike, even though they argue that this part of being Brazilian
is necessary for survival. This cluster is dominated by the concept of
jeitinho, or a uniquely Brazilian notion of flexibility and the
ability to find a way around seemingly insurmountable bureaucratic obstacles.
Research to date has shown that, indeed, these concepts of national identity
are broadly shared, but the relative importance of the different aspects
of Brazilian national identity is highly contested. Currently, data on
how these concepts are translated into beliefs and values of individuals
in everyday life are being collected. The photographs show Brazilians
celebrating World Cup soccer victories, a time at which Brazilians feel
most intensely Brazilian.
SBE-BCS-0136761
Jean
Ensminger
California Institution of Technology
Cultural Anthropology Program
In all human societies,
a wide range of social phenomena are governed by self-regulating institutions,
or sets of norms that prescribe appropriate behaviors and proper sanctions
for inappropriate behavior. Such norms influence an enormous range of
human activity, from marriage patterns and sexual inequality to political
processes and market exchange. Both experimental and field data from across
the social sciences indicate that neither limited economic self-interest
nor evolutionary models based on kinship or reciprocity are sufficient
to account for the observed patterns of human pro-sociality.
To probe the diversity
of social norms and preferences across the human spectrum, a set of researchers
headed by Jean Ensminger will explore the foundations of social norms
by experimentally measuring individuals’ preferences/tastes for altruism
(or fairness), direct punishment (willingness to punish norm violators),
and third party punishment (willingness of third-party observers to pay
a price to punish unfairness) across 16 small-scale societies. These
field sites include foragers, slash and burn horticulturalists, pastoral-nomads,
small-scale agriculturalists, and urban wage laborers on most continents
of the world. One of the advantages of running experiments in these contexts
is that the social spectrum of subjects is broadened from those typically
found in U.S. university laboratories.
This research will
replicate earlier work (including the finding that altruistic behavior
increases with the level of market integration), broaden the research
by including nine new sites and new experiments, tighten the data collection
methods across sites, and to extend the research with new testable predictions.
A core package of three games (the Dictator, Ultimatum with Strategy Method,
and Third-Party Punishment Games) will be used at all 16 field sites.
This project should contribute to theoretical work that explores the importance
of social learning, institutions, cultural evolution, and culture-gene
co-evolution on human behavior. The work has already been written about
in the Economist and other major publications.
Pictures: Members
of the Orma tribe of Kenya playing theoeretical-economic games:
BCS-9907831
Michael Posner (with Bruce McCandliss)
Weill
Medical College of Cornell
Child Learning and Development Program (now Developmental and Learning
Sciences)
Accurate
assessment of children’s attention is essential for continued examination
of the role of attention in the development of skills such as literacy
and numeracy as well as examination of the neurological substrates of
attention. Dr. Michael Posner and colleague Dr. Bruce McCandliss from
the Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology at the Weill Medical
College of Cornell have developed the Attention Network Task to reliably
assess orienting and alerting aspects of attention in children. In their
own work, the Attention Network Task is being used to track an attention-oriented
literacy-training program that is showing initial promise in the laboratory
and in public school settings. As well, they are using this task to
link genetic, EEG, and fMRI findings to attentional behavior. These collaborators
have been involved in a series of international meetings on “Brain and
Education.” Other researchers have begun to use the Attention Network
Task to study ADHD, autism, child abuse, and other conditions that might
affect attentional functioning.
http://sacklerinstitute.org/~mip2003/
BCS-0094814
Scott Johnson
Cornell
University
Developmental and Learning Sciences Program
Over the course
of their first 6 months, infants use perceptual input to move towards
an adult-like understanding of properties of objects. The work of Dr.
Scott Johnson at Cornell University indicates that 2-month-old infants
do not understand the continuity of the existence of an object as it moves
across a screen, becomes occluded, and reemerges on the other side. By
4 months, infants can do this under limited circumstances, and by 6 months
they can do so under the most demanding conditions. A careful look at
eye tracking indicated that 6-month-olds show anticipatory eye movements
when viewing a partially occluded trajectory. For 4-month-old infants,
prior experience following the ball moving along an unoccluded trajectory
leads to anticipatory eye movements like those of older infants as they
track a partially occluded object. This suggests that the particular
experience of visually following a moving object induces adult-like perceptions
in very young infants. Other experiments in this series have examined
the efficacy of two-dimensional and three-dimensional displays, and the
extent to which infants respond to violations in the motion and location
of the hidden regions of an object. This line of work supports the idea
that infant’s knowledge about properties of objects is built through perceptual
experience.
BCS-0004076
Hirokazu
Yoshikawa (with Pamela Morris and Lisa Gennetian)
New York University
Developmental and Learning Sciences
By
pooling data from 12 experimental welfare-to-work demonstrations, Dr.
Yoshikawa and colleagues from New York University have examined the effect
of family changes in income and employment on children’s learning. Mediating
factors that may help explain the relations between family work characteristics
and child learning include parenting, use of childcare, academic expectations,
family structure, and the presence of domestic violence. Simple explanatory
models do not work; in fact, the direct and indirect relations between
family income/employment and learning in middle childhood are different
in families of different races and ethnicities. This finding that experimental
changes in income and employment affect children differently, depending
on their race/ethnicity, brings a focus on culture and development to
public policy analysis and evaluation (typically engaged in by labor economists)
and a policy-relevant focus to cultural and developmental science (typically
engaged in by developmental psychologists). This research brings econometric
methods to the field of developmental psychology and an emphasis of developmental
mediating processes to economics.
BCS-9984250
Matthew Sparke
University of Washington
Geography and Regional Science Program
With the support
of a CAREER award, geographer Matthew Sparke has created new ways to integrate
research and instruction by using globalization as a unifying theme.
Over the past two years, he has developed a new globalization course at
the University of Washington. The course will be taught to more than
500 first-year students this year and involves an outreach program to
minority students in the Seattle area. The course draws from Sparke's
original research on new patterns of cross-border regionalization under
globalization.
Using the Indonesia-Malaysia-Singapore
"Growth Triangle" as a case study, he has advanced understanding
of globalization processes. As in other regions, the Growth Triangle
regional promotion plan seeks to attract inward investment by marketing
itself as a key node of global commerce. While this strategy is similar
to regional place promotion found elsewhere, and while it involves a mix
of both cooperation and competition across the region's borders, Sparke's
research into the local cross-border networks reveals that development
in the Growth Triangle is based substantially on extreme asymmetries between
Singapore and what are effectively resource hinterlands in Johor, Malyasia,
and the Riau islands of Indonesia. Interestingly, this development pattern
promises to change as Singaporese investments in industrial parks and
other infrastructure in the neighboring hinterlands have now set the stage
for increasing competition with Singapore itself. Industrial parks such
as Panbil on Batam island in Indonesia now market themselves not only
as places that are close to Singapore but also as places from where it
is easier to enhance global competitiveness.
BCS-9978058
Michael F. Goodchild
Richard
P. Appelbaum
University of California, Santa Barbara
Geography and Regional Science Program
Over recent decades,
major advances in three sets of technologies (geographic information systems,
the Global Positioning System, and remote sensing) have provided dramatic
new insights into patterns, processes, and changes on the Earth's surface.
Although many disciplines have adopted these technologies and use them
successfully for a variety of inquiries, fewer social and behavioral scientists
have begun to use them on a significant scale. To accelerate the adoption
and use of these technologies, a national center based at the University
of California-Santa Barbara is focusing on the methods, tools, techniques,
software, data access, and other services needed to promote and facilitate
a novel and integrating spatially enabled approach to the social and behavioral
sciences. The center builds on the efforts of the National Center for
Geographic Information and Analysis, engaging in six core programs that
are targeted across the full spectrum from inductive, exploratory science
to theory-based, confirmatory science. Center activities include: (1) Development
of a collection of learning resources covering core concepts, examples,
references to be made available via the World Wide Web. (2) Conduct
of intensive national workshops to introduce social and behavioral scientists
to the methods and tools of spatially enabled social science. (3) Sponsorship
of best-practice examples of the use of spatial approaches in the social
and behavioral sciences. (4) Development of services to facilitate
place-based searches for information resources on the World Wide Web and
in digital libraries. (5) Further development and dissemination
of a powerful and easy-to-use suite of software tools for analysis in
the presence of spatial effects, in collaboration with industrial partners.
(6) Initiation of an open virtual community to share software tools,
modeled on the highly successful communities defined by Linux and GRASS.
Through these and other related activities, many individuals and groups
working in the social and behavioral sciences will find their capabilities
to use new technologies greatly enhanced. Among major research areas
that are benefitting as a result of these efforts are human-environmental
interactions, urban studies, social and economic inequality, social and
business networks, health and disease, criminal justice, and community-based
grassroots organizations.
BCS-9730920
Jan Nijman
Richard
Grant
University of Miami
Geography
and Regional Science Program
Over the last few
decades, cities in the developing world have undergone major transformations
as a result of widespread policies of economic liberalization. Because
of such policies, many cities have been drawn into the global economic
market place. Geographers Jan Nijman and Richard Grant of the University
of Miami documented the corresponding changing corporate geographies of
two cities with comparable historical roles in the global political economy:
Mumbai (formerly Bombay), India, and Accra, Ghana. Based on extensive
field research and surveys, the investigators constructed a database of
foreign corporate activity across these cities and compared the data with
existing data on domestic corporations.
Nijman and Grant's
findings identified an unprecedented surge in foreign corporate activity,
a restructuring of the urban economy, and a profound reorganization of
urban economic space in both cities. Both Mumbai and Accra witnessed
the emergence of a new central business district (CBD) with a high presence
of foreign-controlled companies and large numbers of domestically controlled
multinational corporations. These "global CBDs" are highly
specialized in finance and producer services, and they are quite distinct
from the nationally oriented CBDs that developed as "European towns"
and locally oriented "native towns" that also emerged colonial
times.
When
compared with cities in the developed world, the economic geographies
of Accra and Mumbai are much more segmented and fragmented. This finding
is at odds with theoretical arguments about globalization and homogenization
and suggests, instead, that global economic integration is accompanied
with increased spatial differentiation, at least in the less-developed
world. From a practical point of view, this fragmentation poses a challenge
to urban planning and regional development policies that aim for inclusiveness
and even development.
SBR-9411021
Timothy Nyerges
University
of Washington
Piotr Jankowski
University of Idaho
Geography and Regional Science Program
Multiple
stakeholder groups undertaking salmon habitat restoration in the Duwamish
Waterway of Seattle Washington (see 1st map) now find it easier
to negotiate a consensus about where to develop restoration sites. This
project developed decision support software using geographic information
system (GIS) tools to allow groups of people to identify, describe, rank,
and then visualize site options. A new type of “consensus map” was devised
to allow groups of people to visualize both the priority of their preferred
rankings as well as the consensus status about those priorities (see 2nd
map). The larger the circle the higher the priority; the smaller the
circles the lower the priority. Green circles indicated higher consensus.
Yellow circles indicate medium consensus. Red circles indicate low consensus.
Since the maps are generated in an interactive manner within the GIS,
multiple scenarios can be developed to take into consideration multiple
stakeholder views of what might be best for habitat restoration. During
the group-based laboratory experiment in which the software was evaluated,
numerous participants, both professional environmental analysts and students,
requested access to a version of the software they could use within their
own work. Such encouragements lead the researchers to redevelop the software,
generalizing it so that it could be used for any site selection problem.
The redeveloped version, call Geo-Choice-Perspectives, is now being used
not only in classrooms at the University of Washington and the University
of Idaho, but also in classrooms around the US and in Europe to enhance
education in collaborative geographic decision making. It has been used
for transportation, public health, environmental cleanup, and a variety
of other complex geographic problems.
Upon
completion of the project Professors Jankowski and Nyerges co-authored
a book summarizing five years of research about collaborative spatial
decision making entitled Geographic Information Systems for Group Decision
Making, published by Taylor & Francis in 2001. The book provides
the first comprehensive framework and examples about how GIS is and can
be used to support collaborative geographic decision-making.
Multiple
stakeholder groups undertaking salmon habitat restoration in the Duwamish
Waterway of Seattle Washington (see 1st map) now find it easier
to negotiate a consensus about where to develop restoration sites. This
project developed decision support software using geographic information
system (GIS) tools to allow groups of people to identify, describe, rank,
and then visualize site options. A new type of “consensus map” was devised
to allow groups of people to visualize both the priority of their preferred
rankings as well as the consensus status about those priorities (see 2nd
map). The larger the circle the higher the priority; the smaller the
circles the lower the priority. Green circles indicated higher consensus.
Yellow circles indicate medium consensus. Red circles indicate low consensus.
Since the maps are generated in an interactive manner within the GIS,
multiple scenarios can be developed to take into consideration multiple
stakeholder views of what might be best for habitat restoration.
During
the group-based laboratory experiment in which the software was evaluated,
numerous participants, both professional environmental analysts and students,
requested access to a version of the software they could use within their
own work. Such encouragements lead the researchers to redevelop the software,
generalizing it so that it could be used for any site selection problem.
The redeveloped version, call Geo-Choice-Perspectives, is now being used
not only in classrooms at the University of Washington and the University
of Idaho, but also in classrooms around the US and in Europe to enhance
education in collaborative geographic decision making. It has been used
for transportation, public health, environmental cleanup, and a variety
of other complex geographic problems.
Upon completion of
the project Professors Jankowski and Nyerges co-authored a book summarizing
five years of research about collaborative spatial decision making entitled
Geographic Information Systems for Group Decision Making, published
by Taylor & Francis in 2001. The book provides the first comprehensive
framework and examples about how GIS is and can be used to support collaborative
geographic decision making.
BCS-9906888
Don Mitchell (PI)
Bruce
D’Arcus (co-PI)
Syracuse University
Geography and Regional Science Program
Geographer
Bruce D’Arcus, working under the direction of his advisor Don Mitchell,
explored geographic issues associated with the 1973 occupation of Wounded
Knee, South Dakota, by American Indian activists. Specifically, they
investigated how then-new media technologies influenced the ways that
a range of key actors -- government officials, local tribal government
members, and the occupiers themselves -- responded to this significant
protest. D'Arcus' inquiry focused on how the occupiers were able to stage
a dramatic protest event in what was a marginal location and how federal
representatives responded to such a defiant challenge to their authority.
Drawing on documents from the FBI and other organizations, he found that
protests like Wounded Knee present significant challenges for governments
to manage, and the way governments choose to manage these acts of political
dissent in turn has significant implications for democratic practice.
This research contributes to understanding the relationships between geography,
political dissent, and state power.
BCS-0002347
Anthony Bebbington
Jeffrey
Bury
University of Colorado-Boulder
Geography and Regional Science Program
Under
the direction of Anthony Bebbington while working on his doctoral dissertation,
Jeffrey Bury investigated how transnational corporations (TNCs) are affecting
local livelihoods in the Peruvian Andes. Specifically, the research evaluated
how one company's mining activities have altered household livelihoods
in the Cajamarca region of Peru. By exploring Peruvian archives, conducting
interviews with mine employees and other actors, and holding a series
of focus groups, Bury and others working with him were able to illustrate
how transnational gold mining corporations have radically altered the
resources of the region and how livelihoods are being transformed. Specifically,
the project demonstrated that while positive changes can be documented
with respect to economic and human capital resources that households use
to produce their livelihoods, negative changes have been seen in natural
resources and social relations. The project has generated substantial
research training opportunities for both investigators as well as extensive
outreach activities. Dr. Bury trained several Peruvian field researchers
and offered guest lectures and workshops at universities in Cajamarca
and Lima, Peru.
Three
publications have been generated from the research project thus far and
more are in the process of being submitted to peer-reviewed journals.
Dr. Bury has accepted a job as an assistant professor at San Francisco
State University, and he plans on extending his research in Latin America
focusing on livelihood changes and transitions in the region.
Research Area
Mining in the Cajamarca
area
Research Interviews
and Training
Livelihoods in the
Research Area
SBE-9506062
Barbara Louise Endemaño Walker
University of California Berkeley
Geography and Regional Science Program
Exploring
the pivotal role that women fishtraders play in Ghana's small-scale marine
fishing industry, Dr. Barbara Louise Endemaño Walker has expanded knowledge
about the role of women in the degradation and conservation of marine
resources. While many policy makers assume that fishing practices are
controlled by male fishers, Walker's study illustrates that women have
tremendous influence in the industry through the processing and marketing
of fish and the ownership and financing of fishing equipment such as canoes,
nets, and motors. Data from an ethnographic study of three fishing villages,
including more than 150 interviews with fish traders and fishermen, indicate
that women make important decisions about when fish are caught and whether
or not destructive gear (such as nets with a small mesh size, dynamite,
and poisons) is used. Local social conditions in the context of wider
political and economic changes in Ghana, particularly internationally
funded development interventions, influence these decisions. Walker recruited
Nana Derby (shown conducting an interview), an undergraduate student at
the University of Ghana, to assist in the research. Darby has since come
to the United States to pursue a graduate degree. With the support of
this award, Walker completed her dissertation, "Sisterhood and Seine-Nets:
Engendering Development and Conservation in Ghana's Marine Fishery, was
recognized as a finalist in the Association of American Geographers' Nystrom
dissertation competition. She also has actively presented and published
the results of her research.
BCS-9711357
Daanish Mustafa
James Wescoat
University of Colorado-Boulder
Geography and Regional Science Program
he
Indus basin of Pakistan is home to the largest contiguous surface irrigation
system in the world. Working under the supervision of advisor James Wescoat,
Daanish Mustafa, investigated the social and geographical reasons for
persistent inequities and inefficiencies in irrigation water distribution
and vulnerability to flood hazard in the basin. Mustafa conducted household-level
surveys of water users and flood victims at the local level as well as
detailed interviews with water managers in the nation to document an assessment
of the impact of differential social power on access to irrigation water
and vulnerability to flood hazard. His study found that the large landowners
and tenant farmers are the least affected by irrigation water scarcity,
while small farmers are affected the most. Most flood victims attribute
their flood hazard vulnerability to their powerlessness and the machinations
of the government bureaucracy. Mustafa also found that the state further
accentuated the social power differentials by neglecting social issues
and by emphasizing the pursuit of engineering solutions. His results have
furthered understanding of vulnerability and have clear policy implications
for resource management in Pakistan and in other regions where water shortages
and surpluses are volatile.
SBR-9313704
Kathleen and Albert Parker
University
of Georgia
Geography and Regional Science Program
Since the mid-1990s,
Kathy and Al Parker have been studying the relationship between disturbance
and genetic response in sand pine, a species that dominates scrub environments
in Florida. Tree-ring and allozyme analyses were used to characterize
populations throughout the species range both demographically and genetically.
The Parkers' principal findings underscore the importance of geographic
variation in exposure to prevailing disturbance regime (wind vs. fire),
which is linked to pronounced contrasts in forest structure and, in turn,
to genetic organization within populations at the local scale. This research
emphasizes the need to tailor forest management strategies to local environmental
condition rather than blindly applying uniform treatments to different
populations of a species across its range.
The Parkers are particularly
proud of the educational development of the students supported by this
NSF grant. Four students assisted them in the field and with subsequent
data analyses. An undergraduate supported by an associated REU award
is now in the final year of his doctoral work at Penn State. A Ph.D.
student received an NSF doctoral dissertation research improvement award
for a related project and is now on the faculty at Colgate University,
where she has obtained additional NSF research support to investigate
biological invasions. In addition, two other students successfully completed
Masters degrees in conjunction with the project.
BCS-9875015
Linda R. Barrett
University of Akron
Geography and Regional Science Program
How
long does it take for a soil to form? How much carbon dioxide is removed
from the atmosphere as a soil develops, and how long does it stay under
the ground? These are among the questions geographer Linda R. Barrett
of the University of Akron is investigating as part of activities funded
by a Faculty Early-Career Development (CAREER) grant from the NSF. In
order to answer these and related questions, she has identified three
unique locations in northern Michigan where geological processes have
left an age sequence of sandy soils ranging from just a few years old
to 5,000 years old. Each sequence contains 30 to 50 soils of different
ages that function in the study like a freeze-frame "snapshot."
By sampling the soils through the whole range of ages, Dr. Barrett
has observed how soil properties changed as the soil developed. In addition,
Dr. Barrett installed samplers for extracting water from the soil
at several locations so that she can monitor the chemical qualities of
the water that are moving through the soil as it develops. Information
gained from this study should aid scientists studying global warming to
understand how these sandy soils remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
The first image shows
Dr. Barrett collecting water samples from a previously installed soil
water sampler on a snowy day near Munising in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula
in April of 2002.
The next image shows
a pit dug for describing and sampling soil at a site in the northern part
of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula. The soil shown has been developing about
1500 years, and has a dark layer of organic matter at the surface, a gray-white
zone of leaching below, followed by an orange-brown zone of accumulation.
BCS-9978052
Brent Yarnal
Penn
State
Geography and Regional Science
Understanding global
environmental change in local places cannot happen in isolation. To build
a picture of the local causes and consequences of global change, scientists
who study and monitor this problem must share data, methods, and ideas.
The World Wide Web makes it possible for scientists to work collaboratively
without leaving their computers.
Researchers working
on the Human-Environment Regional Observatory (HERO) project are developing
a collaboratory to foster remote collaboration among scientists studying
global change in far-flung local places.
Collaboratories use
the interconnectivity of the Web to link scientists in near-real to real
time. Collaboratories go beyond e‑mail and instant messengers to
include such novel ideas as Web-based videoconferences, electronic Delphi
tools for collective discussion and decision-making, shared notebooks
and databases, and interactive maps and graphs.
The image here shows
HERO investigators holding a meeting. Although the individuals here are
at the central meeting site in Pennsylvania, HERO team members from Kansas,
Arizona, and Massachusetts join the discussion through a Web-based videoconference.
This tool makes it possible for scientists from around the world to meet
routinely at nominal expense. The techniques being explored by HERO have
greatly facilitated their collaboration, and they demonstrate the utility
of this approach for researchers engaged in a broad range of topics.
Photo credit: Chaoqing
Yu, Department of Geography, Penn State, 2002
BCS-9618371
Thomas Rudel
Rutgers University
Geography and Regional Science Program
Could
zones that once were centerpieces of colonization programs in the urbanizing
and industrializing countries of Latin America become sites where tropical
forest transition sees reforestation become more prevalent than deforestation?
Geographer Thomas Rudel of Rutgers University has addressed this question
through a case study of land-use change and migration since 1985 in a
long-settled region of the Ecuadorian Amazon. Data from remotely sensed
images, household surveys, and land-use maps of individual farms reveal
two distinct patterns of reforestation in the region, one on peripheral
lands far from roads and the other on lands close to roads. Reforestation
is more prevalent near roads in part because small landholders of an indigenous
Amerindian tribe, the Shaur, have abandoned cattle ranching in order to
practice short cycle shifting cultivation of crops for expanding urban
and export markets.
This
example suggests that tropical forest transitions may differ from earlier
temperate forest transitions in that reforestation does not signify land
abandonment. Even as they come to rely more completely on non-farm sources
of income, smallholders in developing countries continue to manage their
land, reforesting only if it eliminates expenses or promises new streams
of income in the near future.
BCS-9618317
Adrian Bailey
University
of Leeds
Richard Wright
Dartmouth College
Ines Miyares
Hunter College
Alison Mountz
University of British Columbia
Geography and Regional Science Program
Salvadorans constitute
one of the fastest growing foreign-born populations in the U.S. Lead
by Richard Wright of Dartmouth College and Adrian Bailey of the University
of Leeds, a team of researchers studied the heterogeneous Salvadoran community
living in northern New Jersey and El Salvador for more than three years.
Through ethnographic approaches, semi-structured interviews, focus groups,
and participant observation, the investigators found that many of the
Salvadorans had entered (and often remained in) the U.S. as undocumented
immigrants and unrecognized refugees struggling to gain political asylum.
This project extended immigration theory by exploring how legal status
-- notably the U.S. policy of Temporary Protective Status ‑‑
affected the decision making of Salvadoran migrants and their families.
Analyses of employment patterns, remittance returns, health status, family
organization, and settlement ambitions cast doubt on the universality
of claims about immigration as a transnational process. The researchers
described the way that many Salvadorans lived their lives as "permanently
temporary."
The project enabled
the researchers to develop and disseminate a dynamic model of collaborative
research that involved researchers of different rank. Several graduate
students used field data that maintained the confidentiality of respondents
in their Masters thesis research, and one of these students (Alison Mountz)
is completing her doctoral dissertation in geography on a related topic.
The research also spawned an REU project that gave a well-qualified undergraduate
(Caroline Kerner--currently completing her graduate work in public health)
field experience and ultimately primary authorship responsibility for
an article presenting some of the results of the team's work.
BCS-0112391
Diane Brentari
Purdue University
Linguistics
Program
Dr. Diane Brentari
is studying the classifier systems of nine sign languages from three different
language families. Classifier systems exist in all known sign languages,
but in only some spoken languages. Classifiers refer to certain properties
of noun arguments but may be expressed in a variety of grammatical units.
For example, they may appear in noun phrases (e.g., "grain"
in "a grain of sand" in English) or verb phrases expressing
motion or location (e.g., "3-handshape + go_by" in American
Sign Language; translation: "A car is going by". Classifiers
in sign languages are typically expressed as handshapes. This research
asks whether nine sign languages use similar handshapes to express similar
meanings and how each system compares to the set of all languages that
contain well-developed classifier systems, both spoken and signed. The
relatively young Israeli Sign Language is included to compare to more
mature classifier systems. Brentari and a linguist in each language community
will collect the data. Elicitation tasks target specific semantic distinctions
such as stative/active, agentive/non-agentive, and telic/atelic. Researchers
will analyze how each sign language uses the components of the total handshape
in its classifier system to express these distinctions.
Three scientific
questions motivate this study of sign language classifiers. First, this
project will contribute to our knowledge of sign languages by providing
cross-linguistic information about a fundamental structure that is not
yet well understood. Second, this project will add to our knowledge of
morphology and the way that it is expressed, since morphology in sign
languages is expressed predominantly by simultaneously organized phonological
units rather than by sequentially organized units. Finally, this research
will contribute to our understanding of the range of classifier typology
in natural languages. In addition to its scientific merit, this project
will recruit native-signing Deaf undergraduate students to help analyze
data, and so provide an opportunity for these students to engage in first-hand
scientific research on their native languages.
BCS-0131882
Joan H. Hall
University
of Wisconsin, Madison
Linguistics Program
Dr. Joan Hall and
her staff are documenting regional and social variation in American English
in the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE). This project
concentrated on entries for Volume IV of DARE (P-Sk), due for publication
in 2002. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press has published two previous
volumes. DARE is based both on extensive fieldwork conducted in 1,002
communities across the United States between 1965 and 1970, and on a massive
collection of written sources (including materials such as diaries, letters,
newspapers, novels, folklore collections, government documents, and electronic
collections) that document English in this country from the 17th
century to the present. DARE provides full historical treatment of the
words, phrases, and pronunciations that vary from one part of this country
to another or that characterize the usage of one social group or another.
Unique to DARE is the inclusion of maps (adjusted to reflect population
density rather than geographic area) showing distributions of words. Though
language inevitably changes over time, and though some have predicted
a homogenization of American English, DARE makes it clear that regional
words and phrases are still very much alive. The dictionary is useful
to many: to forensic linguists, who have used it to help identify crime
suspects; to physicians, who are not be familiar with folk terms for ailments
and diseases; and to psychiatrists and gerontologists who rely on diagnostic
tools that ask patients to give the names of everyday objects. The DARE
volumes are also widely used by teachers, researchers, librarians, journalists,
historians, and playwrights, as well as by readers who simply delight
in our American English language.
BCS-0132145
Valerie M. Fridland
University
of Nevada, Reno
Linguistics Program
In her research on
vowel shifts in Southern dialects of American English, Dr. Valerie Fridland
will compare recent changes in Southern vowels to both older Southern
speech and contemporary Northern speech. Vocalic positions in Northern
and Southern speech are realigning. The resulting systems suggest increasing
divergence between the two dialects. Using Memphis as a field site, Fridland's
research team is collecting naturally-occurring conversational data and
elicited interview data. The acoustic position of vowels in those data
will be analyzed and compared to perceptual tests of the same, as well
as the attitudinal load associated with changes in individual vowels.
By examining the social embedding and the perceptual salience of each
shift, this project will assess the internal (regional) and external (national)
pressures affecting dialect variation and determine how incoming norms
are judged and how they function as displays of local, ethnic, or national
identity for speakers. Shared speech norms generally suggest that speakers
participate in the same communication networks. Thus, an important part
of this research is its documentation of whether both European-Americans
and African-Americans participate in the changes, an indication of racial
integration in the Memphis area. African-Americans do not appear to participate
in the vocalic changes identified in Northern cities, but their role in
the changes affecting Southern speech might explain the origin of some
changes in the Northern African-American vowel system.
This sociolinguistic
project will contribute to the emerging picture of contemporary Southern
speech and speech perceptions. This is significant for both education and
linguistic theory. First, Southern speech is stereotyped as non-standard
nationally. Understanding local norms and the perceptions behind them is
crucial to national testing in education. On an applied level then, the
research has implications for language specialists and educators concerned
with how dialect variation relates to educational and social disadvantages.
Second, this survey of changes in contemporary Southern English will document
convergence and divergence in dialects and reveal the social motivation
of some sound changes. On a theoretical level, the research will provide
insight into the mechanisms behind linguistic change, one of the fundamental
questions driving sociolinguistic research.
BCS-0094638
Ivan A. Sag
Stanford
University
Linguistics Program
Dr. Ivan Sag will
study multiword expressions (MWEs), a problem that must be solved en route
to robust and natural language technology. Fixed expressions can be entered
into a lexicon as words-with-spaces, but this is inadequate even for cases
like 'kicks/kick/kicked/kicking the bucket' ("die") and 'part(s)
of speech'. Further, some semi-fixed expressions exhibit positional variation
(e.g., 'look up the answer/look the answer up'), while others of equal
semantic idiosyncrasy do not (e.g., 'falling off a log/*falling a log
off'). Some patterns appear rule-governed but contain unexpected exceptions
(e.g., 'call/ring/phone/*telephone someone up'). Decomposable phrasal
idioms allow even greater syntactic flexibility: 'Kim pulled the strings
that got Pat the job' and 'The strings that had been pulled in order for
Pat to get the job were more extraordinary than those pulled to get Chris
employed'. Linguistic research has not provided an adequate theory of
these diverse phenomena. This project will fill that gap, developing a
mathematically precise and computationally tractable theory of various
classes of MWEs. The research team will analyze and computationally manipulate
corpus data, integrating discrete and frequentistic methods into a hybrid
theory of the different kinds of MWEs. The emphases include complex word
structures, lexical selection, partially similar grammar rules organized
into "construction hierarchies", idiomatic construction rules
– a new technique for analyzing constructions where idiomatic expressions
may be separated from one another by considerable distance. Compositionally
structured, institutionalized phrases like 'traffic light' and 'phone
booth' will be treated as purely statistical dependencies. The most recent
extraction techniques will be used to develop stochastic constraints and
integrate them into fundamentally discrete, constraint-based grammars.
Since there is still
no comprehensive account of MWEs, this research will contribute to both
basic grammatical theory and our understanding of lexical knowledge. Because
the analyses are mathematically precise and implemented with open-source
software, the results will be of immediate use for the development of robust
language technology in a variety of constraint-based frameworks currently
being explored in the field. Natural language processing applications will
benefit from the results, including those involving language understanding,
language generation, machine translation, and speech-related systems of
various kinds (including speech prostheses for individuals with certain
disabilities). All such applications involve scaling grammars up; and scaling
grammars up to deal with MWEs will necessitate finding the right balance
among various analytic techniques. Of special importance will be finding
the right balance between symbolic and statistical techniques, a difficult
problem whose solution this project's results bear on.
BCS-0196004
Colin Phillips
University of Maryland, College Park
Linguistics Program
This CAREER award
supports Dr. Colin Phillips as he challenges the widespread view of linguistic
knowledge and language processing as independent systems of the mind-brain:
a declarative grammar, and procedural systems dedicated to specialized
tasks. This division is fostered by the typically independent training
that students receive in linguistics and psycholinguistics. Phillips investigates
the hypothesis that the grammatical component of linguistic knowledge
and language processing are products of the same incremental procedural
system. If true, this simplifies the architecture of language and closes
the gap between linguistics and psycholinguistics. Phillips has developed
a program of training for graduate and undergraduate students that provides
students with the skills required for active involvement in an integration
of these approaches.
The project’s research
component has two main foci. In syntactic theory, the project extends
the coverage of a model of incremental left-to-right grammar, in which
grammatical structures are assembled in the same order as sentences are
comprehended and produced. The rest of the research investigates the extent
to which human sentence processing is fully incremental, and the syntactic
search mechanisms that make this possible, using mainly reading-time measures.
A cross-linguistic study of pronoun interpretation compares verb-initial
and verb-final constructions, using a probe-recognition measure. Finally,
studies using high-density ERP recordings investigate the extent to which
electrophysiological measures of the disruption of syntactic parsing reflect
the syntactic search processes underlying normal, successful parsing.
Complementing the
research program, the project includes an integrated program of training
in theoretical and experimental linguistics that emphasizes an active
learning approach. Graduate and advanced undergraduate students study
experimental linguistics in a laboratory-based course sequence that includes
training in experimental design and analyses. Beginning undergraduate
students in large enrollment introductory courses use linguistics as a
vehicle for developing skills in active research and scientific theory
testing, substantially through the use of instructional technology resources.
BCS-0220354
Fengxiang Li
Graham Thurgood
California
State University at Chico
Linguistics Program
Drs.
Fengxiang Li and Graham Thurgood will document three endangered languages
in China: Tsat, an Austronesian language of Hainan Province; Anong, a
Tibeto-Burman language of Yunnan Province; and Oroqen, a Tungusic language
of Inner Mongolia and Heilongjiang Province in northeast China. Although
these languages are undergoing rapid change because of their close contact
with Chinese, they are geographically separated, typologically different,
and genetically distinct. Comparison of them is a rare opportunity to
study how very different languages change under intense contact, not with
a variety of different languages, but with the same language. American
scholars will work with Chinese specialists in these languages whose detailed
but unpublished records predate the most intense contact and continue
to the modern era. Li and Thurgood will translate the existing Chinese
descriptions, incorporating new material to fill gaps. In collaboration
with Chinese linguists, they will then update analyses based on the data
collected in summer fieldwork trips. A comprehensive reference grammar
for each language will be produced at the end of the project period.
Three interrelated
areas of linguistics are significant in this project: language change,
typology, and history. In terms of language change, the project investigates
effects of dialectal variation, patterns of bilingualism, intense contact
of three distinct languages with the same super-stratum language, and
language obsolescence on structural shift. Typological studies are often
based on well-known languages. This project will address that imbalance
with typological information about minority languages in China. In all
three cases, but especially for Anong and Oroqen, this project will provide
more accurate assessment of the genetic affiliations within their respective
language families. In addition, this documentation is urgent because the
speakers of these languages are beginning to disappear and the Chinese
linguists who worked on their earlier stages have begun to retire. Every
time another language dies, aspects of culture are lost. For example,
thousands of years of the history of a people can only be accessed through
study of their language. The project also brings American and Chinese
linguists together to save part of their mutual heritage.
BCS-0132463
Gillian Sankoff
University of Pennsylvania
Linguistics Program
Dr.
Sankoff studies how language change at the community level relates to
stability at the individual level. Her project investigates linguistic
change in a community of French speakers, taking advantage of a unique
series of tape recordings made between 1971 and 1995. The original corpus
consists of tapes and transcripts of 120 native French-speaking Montrealers,
stratified by age, sex, and social class. Half the speakers were re-recorded
in 1984, and a subset of those were followed through 1995. The project
will establish trends at the community level and assess the degree of
stability across individual speaker lifespans. Since the speech has already
been collected and transcribed, research activities will emphasize quantitative
analyses of phonetics, grammar, and lexicon across speakers. Eight different
features will be used to track differential malleability of these linguistic
subsystems. For example, people might modify their grammars more readily
than they do their childhood accents.
This
sociolinguistic research will refine the concept of a "critical period"
for language learning. This is the maturational period before puberty
when children acquire their native languages. For most people, basic linguistic
knowledge forms a relatively stable system throughout life. Although people
learn new vocabulary across their lifespan, most 50- or 60-year olds are
faithful to the sound system and the grammar of the language they learned
as children. And yet, languages are constantly changing. To account for
how both situations can be true, earlier models of language change emphasized
the transmission of linguistic information from adults to children. This
research also addresses how language change affects communication, even
across generations within the same speech community. Understanding language
change as experienced across the lifespans will help to solve the puzzle
of how and why people alter their speech, when the ensuing changes affect
communication. The project will also address the limits of the possible,
in examining the barriers to linguistic remodeling in later life for people
who encounter new languages or dialects as adults.
BCS-0096588
Kenneth Kidd
Yale University
Physical Anthropology Program
The human genome
project has provided a surfeit of data on human DNA including not just
a reference sequence for the species but increasingly information on the
variation in that sequence that makes each human unique. That variation,
when examined in specific human populations, carries important information
about the histories and demographics of human populations and is important
for both physical anthropology and human population genetics. The NSF
has funded development of an online database, ALFRED <http://alfred.med.yale.edu/alfred>,
as a tool to allow ready access to these data for the entire scientific
community. In order to be maximally useful, the database must store information
on the exact molecular nature of the DNA variation and the frequencies
of the variants in specified human populations. During the first year
of funding, the focus has been on refining the structure of the database,
developing tools for the curators to manage the data being extracted from
a highly diverse scientific literature, and improving the ways scientists
(and students) can search for and display information using the World
Wide Web. The amount of genetic data in the database has doubled to more
than 6000 tables; each table contains the frequencies of variants at a
specific site in the human genome in a specific, well defined human population.
Efforts are now focusing on entry of more data from the literature. Currently,
ALFRED has tools for accessing the raw allele frequency data and the data
can be displayed graphically either as frequencies or as heterozygosities
and numerically in different tabular representations. The data can also
be downloaded to the researcher's local computer. To the degree possible
ALFRED will either have links to or contain specific laboratory protocols
used to type the polymorphisms as well as links to other relevant molecular
and genetic databases. ALFRED also contains detailed descriptions of the
populations for which genetic data are available and active links over
the World Wide Web to other databases containing ethnographic, demographic,
and linguistic information on each population. Though still in its developmental
phase, ALFRED, is already being accessed by 30 scientists per month.
BCS-0094928
Jeanne Beck
Coriell Institute
Jeanne Altmann (co-PI)
Princeton University
BCS-0094993
Oliver Ryder
Zoological Society of San Diego
Nathan Flesness (co-PI)
International Species Information System
David Stockwell (collaborator)
San Diego Supercomputer Center
Physical
Anthropology Program
A central and essential
resource for the myriad of studies concerned with the nature of human
cognition and origins, primate social systems, primate evolution, primate
biodiversity, conservation, and molecular evolution is a biomaterials
collection that makes available to the research community well documented
and well characterized cells and DNA from a wide variety of primates.
Recognizing this need, the Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic
Sciences (SBE) has recently funded the Integrated Primate Biomaterials
and Information Resource (IPBIR). The Resource was created by a partnership
of five organizations: Princeton University, the Coriell Institute for
Medical Research (Coriell), the Zoological Society of San Diego (ZSSD),
International Species Information System (ISIS), and the San Diego Supercomputer
Center (SDSC). The purpose of the IPBIR is to assemble, characterize,
and distribute high-quality biomaterials from animals of know provenance
with accompanying demographic, geographic, and behavioral information
in order to stimulate and facilitate research in primate genetic diversity
and evolution, comparative genomics, and population genetics. The collection
will include species from each genus of the order Primates with each species
being represented by at least one male and one female and numerous samples
from a few species for the study of genetic variability and to support
developmental studies. Tissues have been obtained from both captive and
wild animals and these have been used for the establishment of many types
of cell lines, including those derived from blood, skin, brain, and fat.
Where possible adult stem cells have been isolated and cultured in
vitro since these cells may be capable of differentiating into many
different types of cells under the appropriate growth conditions. The
samples will be distributed openly by the Coriell Institute to the broad
scientific community which agrees to restrict use to non-commercial purposes.
IPBIR has the great potential for enhancing our understanding of the genetic
diversity and evolutionary relationships within and among species of primates.
This is particularly important as most primates are highly endangered
and such efforts will aid in conservation. The resource also is making
significant strides towards enhancing the development of scientific infrastructure
in countries that are home to nonhuman primates.
BCS-0087329
Clifford J. Jolly
Todd R. Disotell
Monica Uddin
New York University
Physical Anthropology Program
The purpose of this
project was to investigate the relationship between transposable element
(TE) activity and reproductive isolation by testing a graded series of
hybrids in the Old World monkey (OWM) papionin group while assisting in
the support of doctoral research by a promising female scientist, Monica
Uddin.
TEs are small (100-10
kb bp) genetic elements that have retained their ability to move about,
or transpose, within genomes. Higher rates of transposition occur when
genomes are subjected to stressful conditions, including hybridization
events between individuals from genetically distinct populations. The
specific, NSF-supported goals of the thesis were 1) to test for evidence
of a correlation between amplification of a particular TE, baboon endogenous
virus (BaEV), and hybrid fertility in the genomes of hybrid papionins;
and 2) to determine the degree to which amplification increases with increased
evolutionary distance between parental taxa. Samples included: fertile
hybrids between the closely related baboon species Papio hamadryas
and P. anubis from a natural population in the Awash National Park
(ANP), Ethiopia (N=79); a fertile female hybrid gelada (Theropithecus
gelada) x hamadryas (P. hamadryas) and a sterile male hybrid
of the same cross; and a sterile male macaque (Macaca mulatta )
x hamadryas (P. hamadryas) hybrid. Non-admixed individuals (N=69)
were also tested to determine BaEV copy number prior to possible amplification.
A combination of PCR techniques were used to collect data from this graded
series of OWM hybrids, and results were combined with previously collected
BaEV sequence data to determine the extent of BaEV variation in a natural
primate population. The findings should contribute to an initial assessment
of the evolutionary significance of TE activity in mammalian hybrids,
enabling us to infer at what point hybrid recombination ceases to be a
potential site of reproductive isolation and, possibly, speciation.
Although this project
has yet to be completed, significant progress has been made toward the
overall goal of obtaining an improved dissertation. NSF funding of this
project has enabled the training of the student in areas that extend beyond
the classic boundaries of anthropology. The research areas investigated
with the assistance of this grant—transposable elements, speciation, primate
evolution, to name a few—have provide expertise in areas that will become
the basis of her future work as a scientist. According to Uddin "the
most valuable aspect of the project, however, has been the opportunity
I have had to conceive of and execute a non-traditional thesis; the experience
has been pivotal to my training as a scientist and will undoubtedly serve
me well in my future career."
BCS-9910344
Tim White
University of California, Berkeley
Physical Anthropology Program
A fossilized skullcap
discovered by the NSF-funded Middle Awash research project in the Afar
desert of Ethiopia was announced in the March 21st, 2002 cover
story of Nature. The skullcap, found by Berkeley graduate
student Henry Gilbert, represents the latest clue in efforts to decipher
the evolutionary role of Homo erectus, a species whose remains
were first found in Java more than a century ago.
The Middle Awash
project has found several other important hominid fossils, but the team’s
latest research revealed the skullcap, leg bones from the same early human,
as well as abundant stone tools. Project geologists established that
the sediments embedding the antiquities were deposited one million years
ago.
At one million years
old, and placed geographically in Africa’s Horn, the hominid fossils were
perfectly positioned in space and time to solve a major research problem
that has confounded researchers attempting to understand the evolutionary
relationships of different early hominids. Homo erectus originated around
two million years ago in a yet-unknown region. Once Homo erectus had
originated, its way of life allowed it to spread widely and invade new
habitats.
The new Ethiopian
fossils, the most complete evidence of Homo erectus in that country, are
very similar to other African, Asian, and European contemporaries. The
team’s analysis of the new fossil skullcap showed that it is impossible
to cleanly segregate Homo erectus crania from different continents. According
to Professor Tim White of U.C. Berkeley, the analysis showed that as of
one million years ago, Homo erectus was probably a single species with
gene flow across its known range from Java to Italy to Ethiopia. Like
other widespread large mammals such as the tiger, Homo erectus was a species
that comprised local populations (demes) that differed slightly, but gene
flow among them prevented subsequent species-level splitting.
The international
team noted that it is possible that the global effects of the major Pleistocene
glaciations (the “Ice Ages”) that began about 950,000 years ago played
a critical role in splitting this once-widespread ancestral species into
Asian and Afro-European branches. After the split, the western branch
appears to have led to Homo sapiens in Africa and Neanderthals in Europe.
In Africa, the new Ethiopian fossils complete an evolutionary sequence
between 1.8 and 0.6 million years ago. Indeed, the Middle Awash research
area, with a record now spanning the last six million years (three times
longer than at the famous Olduvai Gorge), has already yielded the world’s
most impressive succession of human ancestors. The research team is confident
that ongoing work there will continue to allow a deeper understanding
of human origins and evolution.
The diagram shows
the inferred relationships between the new Ethiopian fossil hominids from
Daka and other sets of fossils across the Old World. The circles indicate
“paleo-demes” for which fossil evidence has been recovered. Demes are
local populations within a species.
BCS-0129453
Michael Birnbaum
California State University, Fullerton
Social Psychology Program
his
Advanced Training Institute provides training on the new methods and techniques
by which social psychological research can be conducted via the internet.
The internet allows for rapid collection of large samples of data with
minimal costs associated with printing, mailing, testing, lab space, lab
assistants, and data coding/entry. The Internet can also be used as a
device for recruiting participants from different cultures or participants
who have special characteristics that might be rare in the world's population.
The first training institute was held at California State University,
Fullerton in January, 2002. It included a team of six instructors, and
15 participants, who spent four days studying methodological issues associated
with using the internet to conduct experiments and learning how to use
software tools to assemble such experiments. The Institute will continue
to offer the same course of training on an annual basis, and maintains
a web site (http://psych.fullerton.edu/mbirnbaum/www/)
for course materials, software resources, useful links, and archives.
BCS-0196421
Joshua Aronson
New
York University
Social Psychology Program
t has been documented that African Americans and Latinos do not perform
as well as Whites on standardized tests and in school. Explanations for
this problem typically point to economic, cultural, and educational factors,
and sometimes even to group differences in intelligence. However, these
factors do not fully account for the observed differences because the
differences persist even when students of different ethnicities are equated
in their preparation, skill, and socioeconomic status. Other factors must
be involved. The PI has documented the influence of a powerful psychological
factor operating in academic and testing situations. This factor -- stereotype
threat -- is an apprehension about confirming widely-held stereotypes
alleging the academic inferiority of certain people (e.g., Blacks, Latinos)
or of certain people in specific situations (e.g., women in mathematics
domains). Stereotype threat can arise any time a negative stereotype is
relevant or pertains to an academic or achievement setting (e.g., taking
an intelligence test, being called upon in class). Research supported
by this CAREER award aims to develop methods that can reduce or eliminate
the negative consequences of stereotype threat.
In
a report published in the March, 2002 issue of Journal of Experimental
Social Psychology, the PI reported a successful method for helping students
resist these responses to stereotype threat. Students in the experiment
were encouraged to see intelligence -- the object of the stereotype --
as a malleable rather than a fixed capacity. This mind-set was expected
to make students' performances less vulnerable to stereotype threat and
help them to maintain their psychological engagement with academics, both
of which could help boost their college grades. Results were consistent
with this hypothesis. The African American students (and, to some degree,
the White students) encouraged to view intelligence as malleable reported
greater enjoyment of the academic process, they showed signs of greater
academic engagement, and they obtained higher grade point averages than
their counterparts in two control groups.
BCS-9727896
Lisa Feldman-Barrett
Boston
College
Social Psychology Program
A
powerful methodology in the study of social behavior is called experience
sampling. The idea is to query people as they go about their daily lives,
without having to bring them into the laboratory. The challenge with this
methodology is having the tools with which data can be collected and managed
in the field. Taking advantage of the recent availability of small, palm-sized
computers, the PI developed a software package to accomplish experience
sampling. The package – called ESP (Experience Sampling Program) – is
distributed free of charge from the PI’s website. The software runs on
handheld computers running either the Palm or Windows CE operating systems.
It allows the experimenter to program questions, and it records answers
(including the participant’s response time). The data can then be downloaded
in the laboratory at the conclusion of the study. Thanks to the PI’s investment
in developing this tool (with a grant supplement) many researchers have
been spared the cost and time of developing similar software. In addition,
it helps to introduce some standardization and sharing of resources within
this research community.
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BCS-0094309
Sheena S. Iyengar
Columbia
University
Social
Psychology Program
Conventional wisdom
and decades of research in American psychology have suggested a link between
the provision of choice and intrinsic motivation, which in turn has been
correlated with numerous psychological benefits, including better performance
and higher levels of satisfaction. Conversely, the absence of choice has
been shown to detrimentally affect intrinsic motivation and performance.
So ingrained is the assumption that people will find choice intrinsically
motivating, that psychologists have rarely paused to examine the more
general applicability of these findings. Rarely have circumstances been
considered in which the provision of choice(s) may not be intrinsically
motivating. Considered even less, is the possibility that having others
make the choice may, in certain contexts, inspire greater intrinsic motivation
and increased commitment to the chosen activity. Moreover, it has been
implicitly presumed that the phenomena demonstrated in laboratory experiments
with primarily European American participants will generalize cross-culturally.
This research explores the mediating mechanisms underlying the relationship
between choice and intrinsic motivation.
The relevance of
this research can be observed across a wide array of choice-making settings.
In organizational settings, this research examines the way correlates
of employee motivation and performance vary across culture and vary across
their choice-making perceptions and goals. Financial 401k decisions may
be influenced by choosers' perceptions of their choice-making goal in
that people striving to identify the personally most optimal 401k retirement
plan option may actually prefer to opt out of the choice-making process,
even when doing so is sub-optimal. Similarly, interviewees perceiving
employment options as involving the identification of the personally most
optimal preference may in the choosing process examine more options, and
yet experience greater dissatisfaction resulting in reduced tenure in
their jobs of choice, as compared to interviewees searching for the employment
choice which enables them to fulfill their obligations to others. The
research takes place in corporate, consumer, financial, and job interview
contexts in addition to laboratory settings, and therefore enriches a
theoretical understanding of choosers responses to various choice-making
contexts and provides better information about important aspects of choice
in complex real-world settings.
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