suzanne dikker

PROJECT VIDEOS

FUNDING SOURCES

It takes a village: An interdisciplinary community neuroscience approach to characterize multigenerational interactions

Sponsor: European Research Council Consolidator Grant

While many of our daily interactions involve people of different ages, little is known about how the human brain supports naturalistic communication between generations. InterCom combines laboratory research with real-world experimentation, and intrapersonal analyses with interpersonal measures (e.g. ‘brain-to-brain synchrony’), to better understand multi-generational communication, both within and beyond family contexts. Do age-related differences in brain rhythms inhibit conversational flow? How do listeners process speech produced by children or older adults? Can intergenerational miscommunications be partly attributed to the fact that children and older adults are less likely to predict what others are about to say? How can we overcome implicit neurobehavioral culprits of misalignment? Curiously, while laboratory studies have shown that there are significant differences in how children, adults, and older adults process (non)verbal information, these and related questions remain largely unanswered.  InterCom will test a novel ‘community neuroscience’ approach, one that flows from the real world, to the lab, and back. We will collect brain, body, and language data from groups of children, adults, and older adults during real-world storytelling events that are co-designed with community partners. The data collected during these events will then inform and constrain subsequent laboratory studies and vice versa. As such, InterCom leverages the benefits while offsetting the downsides of both naturalistic observations and experimental control, and will innovate on and combine laboratory and real-world data collection, stimulus development, and data analysis in a truly reciprocal manner. Together, InterCom will tread previously uncharted territory in both intergenerational and real-world neuroscience research to generate insights and tools to investigate and improve communication between and across generations.

A participatory science program and platform for students, teachers, scientists, and communities

Sponsor: National Institute of Mental Health - Science-Education Partnership Program

The project combines online and in-person tools to support authentic research experiences for youth from both urban and rural schools across the US, who will work with scientists and civic partners to design studies that explore the relationship between our brains and our environment (e.g., How is our brain health and wellbeing affected by our environment? Can we help improve how we behave toward our environment by deepening our understanding of how the human brain is wired?). The program uses an open science and participatory science approach, training the next generation of scientists and communities to view challenges not just as barriers, but as opportunities for research, innovation, and collaboration R25 MH135446-01.

Preparing youth for the 21st century world: A collaborative research tool to build civic science and data literacy for learners and their communities

Sponsor: Learning Agency Tools Competition - Growth Phase

We have assembled a team of designers, developers, scientists, and researchers across the USA and Latin-America to test and develop globally scalable community science platform. We will combine a participatory science learning approach with AI-supported behavioral science inquiry and data engagement tools to build and mutually reinforce youth’s data and civic science literacies, and support them in turning their sense of anxiety around big questions like climate change, into a sense of agency. [ more ]

Crowdsourcing neuroscience: An interactive cloud-based citizen science platform for high school students, teachers, and researchers

Sponsor: National Science Foundation - Directorate for Education and Human Resources

Current priorities in school science education include engaging students in the practices of science as well as the ideas of science. This project will address this priority by developing a cloud-based platform that enables high school students, teachers, and scientists to conduct original neuroscience research in school classrooms. Before students and teachers initiate their own studies using the system, they will participate in existing research studies by contributing their own data and collaborating with researchers using the online, interactive system. When experienced with the system, students and teachers will become researchers by developing independent investigations and uploading them to the interactive platform. Both student-initiated and scientist-initiated proposals will be submitted to the platform, peer-reviewed by students and scientists, revised, and included in the online experimental bank. In addition to conducting their own studies using the platform, scientists will act as educators and mentors by populating the experiment bank with studies that can serve as models for students and provide science content for the educational resource center. This online system addresses a critical need in science education to involve students more fully and authentically in scientific inquiry where they gain experience in exploring the unknown rather than confirming what is already known. NSF #2241751

Promoting Students' Data Literacy through the Creation of Interactive Multimodal Representations of Biometric Data

Sponsor: National Science Foundation - Directorate for Education and Human Resources

This project promotes data literacy in high school students by engaging them in learning about the Quantified Self -- the practice of using technology to track and reflect on one’s own biological, behavioral, physical, and/or emotional data. The goal of the program is to spark a broad interest in science and to help develop learners to develop informed opinions about the role of human-generated data in public life. To achieve this goal, the project will develop and test software tools as well as lesson and professional development materials with which learners and their teachers can explore, analyze, and create novel, multimodal, and interactive representations of data, recorded by wearable biosensing devices. Students will learn about how data from their bodies can be captured and interpreted through hands-on STEM activities that include the creation of interactive data representations; they can design and execute small exploration projects to answer their own questions, and they can create offline and online artifacts to communicate their findings. The program engages learners in discussions about data ethics, and instructors and students have opportunities to connect with industry partners who work with biosensing and wearable technologies, and to access career and college readiness resources relevant to these and related data technology fields. (NSF #1908482)

SCIENCE/ART
Harmonic Dissonance - Interrogating the algorithms that describe our interactions with each other and with the world around us