Category: Students Page 16 of 42

An Undergraduate Student Grapples with Morality

On July 29, 2019

Existential speculations are normal part of college, and parents shouldn’t worry too much if their child calls home freshman year to speculate on the writings of Immanuel Kant or Sigmund Freud with them. It’s all part of growing up.

But for Shenyang Huang (C’20), these existential questions aren’t just pastimes: They’re work.

As a neuroscience major and a participant in Duke’s Summer Neuroscience Program, Huang has spent eight weeks of his summer in the Imagination and Modal Cognition laboratory researching under Dr. Felipe De Brigard, a three-in-one professor of philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience. Huang has been working at the intersection of those fields with PhD student Matt Stanley to explore some hefty questions about morality and memory.

Shenyang Huang is a rising senior Neuroscience student at Duke. (Image provided by Huang)

The team is grappling with our past mistakes, and how they’ve impacted who we are today. Specifically, how do we remember moments when we behaved immorally? And how do those moments shape the way we think of ourselves?

These questions have been approached from various angles in different studies. One such study, published in 2016 by Maryam Kouchaki and Frencesca Gino, claims that “Memories of unethical actions become obfuscated over time.” Or rather, we forget the bad things we’ve done in the past. According to their study, it’s a self-preservation method for our current concepts of self-worth and moral uprightness.

“I was surprised when I read the Kouchaki and Gino study,” Huang explains. “They claim that people try to forget the bad things they’d done, but that doesn’t feel right. In my life, it’s not right.”

In their two-part study, Stanley and Huang surveyed nearly 300 online participants about these moments of moral failure. They reported memories ranging from slightly immoral events, like petty thievery and cheating on small assignments, to highly immoral incidences, like abusing animals or cheating on significant others. Through questionnaires, the team measured the severity of each incident, how vividly the person recollected the experience, how often the memory would bubble to consciousness on its own, how they emotionally responded to remembering, and how central each event was to the subject’s life.

Their preliminary results resonate more with Huang: Highly immoral actions were recalled more vividly than milder transgressions, and they were generally considered more central in subjects’ life narratives.

“Moral memories are central to one’s sense of self,” Huang says, “and the other paper didn’t discuss centrality in one’s life at all.”

Felipe DeBrigard is an assistant professor of philosophy and a member of the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences. (Les Todd, Duke Photo)

Though contradictory to what Kouchaki and Gino found, the findings have a firm foundation in current psychology literature, De Brigard says. “There are a lot of studies backing the contrary [to Kouchaki and Gino], including research on criminal offenses. People who have committed crimes of passion are known to suffer from a kind of moral PTSD — they constantly relive the event.”

Huang’s study is only one branch of research in a comprehensive analysis of morality and memory De Brigard is exploring now, with the help from the six graduate and eight undergraduate students operating out of his lab.

“Working in a lab with philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists, you see different approaches to the same overarching problem,” Huang says. And as he begins to consider PhD programs in neuroscience, this interdisciplinary exposure is a huge asset.

“It’s helpful and inspiring — I can’t take every class, but I can sit and overhear conversations in the lab about philosophy or psychology and learn from it. It widens my perspective.”

by Vanessa Moss

Nature Shows a U-Turn Path to Better Solar Cells

By Karl Bates

On July 24, 2019

In Chemistry, Environment/Sustainability, Nanotech, Physics, Students

The technical-sounding category of “light-driven charge-transfer reactions,” becomes more familiar to non-physicists when you just call it photosynthesis or solar electricity.

When a molecule (in a leaf or solar cell) is hit by an energetic photon of light, it first absorbs the little meteor’s energy, generating what chemists call an excited state. This excited state then almost immediately (like trillionths of a second) shuttles an electron away to a charge acceptor to lower its energy. That transference of charge is what drives plant life and photovoltaic current.

A 20 Megawatt solar farm ( Aerial Innovations via wikimedia commons)

The energy of the excited state plays an important role in determining solar energy conversion efficiency. That is, the more of that photon’s energy that can be retained in the charge-separated state, the better. For most solar-electric devices, the excited state rapidly loses energy, resulting in less efficient devices.

But what if there were a way to create even more energetic excited states from that incoming photon?

Using a very efficient photosynthesizing bacterium as their inspiration, a team of Duke chemists that included graduate students Nick Polizzi and Ting Jiang, and faculty members David Beratan and Michael Therien, synthesized a “supermolecule” to help address this question.

“Nick and Ting discovered a really cool trick about electron transfer that we might be able to adapt to improving solar cells,” said Michael Therien, the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Chemistry. “Biology figured this out eons ago,” he said.

“When molecules absorb light, they have more energy,” Therien said. “One of the things that these molecular excited states do is that they move charge. Generally speaking, most solar energy conversion structures that chemists design feature molecules that push electron density in the direction they want charge to move when a photon is absorbed. The solar-fueled microbe, Rhodobacter sphaeroides, however, does the opposite. What Nick and Ting demonstrated is that this could also be a winning strategy for solar cells.”

The chemists devised a clever synthetic molecule that shows the advantages of an excited state that pushes electron density in the direction opposite to where charge flows. In effect, this allows more of the energy harvested from a photon to be used in a solar cell.

“Nick and Ting’s work shows that there are huge advantages to pushing electron density in the exact opposite direction where you want charge to flow,” Therien said in his top-floor office of the French Family Science Center. “The biggest advantage of an excited state that pushes charge the wrong way is it stops a really critical pathway for excited state relaxation.”

“So, in many ways it’s a Rube Goldberg Like conception,” Therien said. “It is a design strategy that’s been maybe staring us in the face for several years, but no one’s connected the dots like Nick and Ting have here.”

In a July 2 commentary for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Bowling Green State University chemist and photoscientist Malcom D.E. Forbes calls this work “a great leap forward,” and says it “should be regarded as one of the most beautiful experiments in physical chemistry in the 21^st century.”

Here’s a schematic from the paper.
(Image by Nick Polizzi)

CITATION: “Engineering Opposite Electronic Polarization of Singlet and Triplet States Increases the Yield of High-Energy Photoproducts,” Nicholas Polizzi, Ting Jiang, David Beratan, Michael Therien. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, June 10, 2019. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1901752116 Online: https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/07/01/1908872116

Innocent Until Proven Guilty? Well, That Depends

By Guest Post

On July 22, 2019

In Behavior/Psychology, Policy, Students

This is the last of eight blog posts written by undergraduates in PSY102: Introduction to Cognitive Psychology, Summer Term I 2019.

In the criminal justice system, one might imagine that the more serious a crime is, the more extensive the evidence should be to support the verdict. However, a recent study conducted at Duke University finds that jurors assessment of guilt is less reliant on the type of evidence and more on the severity of the crime.

Mock jurors in the study were more likely to find someone charged with murder guilty than someone charged with robbery.

A still from the movie “Twelve Angry Men” (1954), a tense drama about jury deliberations.

Numerous scholars have looked at how flawed forensic evidence, mistaken eyewitness identifications and defendants’ prior criminal convictions can introduce errors in criminal prosecutions.

But John Pearson, an assistant professor in four Duke departments including neurobiology, and his colleagues in law wanted to know whether the type of crime can also lead to a greater chance of wrongful conviction. It may be that jurors use moral and emotional responses to various crimes as reasoning for the decisions they make regarding the defendant’s guilt.

The researchers aimed to understand the relationship between crime severity and confidence in guilt by seeing how mock jurors, practicing prosecutors, and other practicing lawyers weigh various types of evidence in order to make a decision on guilt.

Participants in the study were subjected to about 30 crime scenarios, each one paired with a random variety of types of evidence. After participants read through each respective scenario, they rated the strength of the case on a 0-100 scale and their emotional and moral responses.

It appeared that the more threat or outrage they felt toward crime type, the more likely they were to find the defendant guilty.

The authors also tested different types of evidence’s potential interaction with people’s beliefs.

They found that both DNA and non-DNA physical evidence had the highest amount of influence on participants, but the difference between how the participants weighed them was small. The jurors appeared to place very similar, if not the same amount of weight onto these two types of evidence in terms of their confidence.

Pearson refers to juror’s equal weight of DNA and non DNA evidence as the “CSI effect.” But DNA evidence is far more reliable than non DNA evidence. The CSI effect lays out that jurors tend to give more weight to conclusions based on traditional evidence. The study found that no matter one’s position, the pattern of similar weight between the DNA and non DNA evidence was found across all groups. The study also states that “subjects tend to overweight widely used types of forensic evidence, but give much less weight than expected to a defendant’s criminal history.”

Along with finding similar patterns between confidence in guilt and evidence type, researchers also discovered an intense link between the subject’s confidence in guilt with the severity of the crime.

Notably for jurors, crime type highly influenced their perception of confidence in guilt. The study showed a positive correlation between personal, emotional, and moral biases and “adjudicative bias,’ or the likelihood of conviction.

And while jurors did show more of a trend in this finding, practicing lawyers and prosecutors also exhibited a crime-type bias correlation with the seriousness of crime, even though it was much smaller.

The study’s results model how punishment, outrage, and threat are almost entirely dependent on crime effect and crime scenario. This indicates that despite how much evidence was presented, crime type alone influenced jurors decisions to charge someone as guilty of that crime more frequently.

This could mean that regardless of how much evidence or what type of evidence is present, innocent people wrongly charged of crimes could more easily be convicted if it is a more severe offense.

These findings indicate how easy it is to reach wrongful convictions of severe crimes within the US criminal justice system.

Guest post by Casey M. Chanler

6-Month-Old Brains Are Categorically Brilliant

By Guest Post

On July 18, 2019

In Behavior/Psychology, Students

This is the seventh of eight blog posts written by undergraduates in PSY102: Introduction to Cognitive Psychology, Summer Term I 2019.

Let’s say you visit your grandmother later today and come across a bowl of unknown exotic berries that look and taste similar to a raspberry. Your grandmother tells you that they are called bayberries. How would your mind react to the new word “bayberry”?

Research shows that an adult brain would probably categorize the word “bayberry” into the category of berries, and draw connections between “bayberry” and other related berry names.

But how do you think an infant would deal with a word like “bayberry”? Would he or she categorize the word the same way you would?

Elika Bergelson, a developmental psychologist at Duke University, provided some possible answers for this question in a study published in the Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences.

Six-month-old infants were shown two objects on a screen simultaneously, as a speaker provided labeling for one of the objects (eg. Look at the dog!).

The thing on the right is a shoe, sweetie. We’re not sure about that other thing…

The two objects were either literally related or unrelated. For example, the words nose and mouth are semantically, or literally, related since they both refer to body parts, while the words nose and boots are semantically unrelated.

As the babies were presented with these objects, their eye movements were tracked. The longer a baby stared at an object, the more confident he or she is presumed to be about the object’s match with the label. This acted as an indicator of how well the baby understood which object the label was referring to.

If the infants categorized words into semantically related groups, then they’d be more likely to confuse objects that are related. This means that the infants would perform better at choosing the correct object when the objects are unrelated.

The results suggest that infants approach words no differently than adults. The babies correctly identified the labeled object more frequently when the two were unrelated than when the two objects were related. This indicates that babies have the mental representation of words categorized into semantically related groups. When encountering two unrelated objects, babies can quickly distinguish between the two objects because they do not belong to the same mental category.

However, when the two objects are related, the infants often confuse them with each other because they belong to the same or closely related categories — while 6-month-olds have developed a general categorization of nouns, their categories remain broad and unrefined, which causes the boundaries between objects in the same category to be unclear.

So what do all these results mean? Well, back to the bayberry example, it means that a 6-month-old will place the word “bayberry” into his or her mental category of “berries.” He or she might not be able to distinguish bayberries from raspberries the next time you mention the word “bayberry,” but he or she will definitely not point to bayberries when you drop the word “milk” or “car.”

If the results of this study can be replicated, it means that the infant approach to language is much more similar to adults than researchers previously thought; the infants have already developed a deep understanding of semantics that resembles grown-ups much earlier than researchers previously speculated.

While the results are exciting, there are limitations to the study. In addition to the small sample size, the infants mainly came from upper middle class families with highly educated parents. Parents in these families tend to spend more time with their infant and expose the infant with more words than parents with lower socio-economic status. So these findings might not be representative of the entire infant population. Nevertheless, the study sheds light on how infants approach and acquire words. It’s also possible this finding could become a new way to detect language delay in infants by the age of six-months.

Guest post by Jing Liu, a psychology and neuroscience major, Trinity 2022.

A Mind at Rest Still Has Feelings

By Guest Post

On July 15, 2019

In Behavior/Psychology, Students

This is the sixth of eight blog posts written by undergraduates in PSY102: Introduction to Cognitive Psychology, Summer Term I 2019.

Emotions drive our everyday lives: They help us make decisions, they guide us into acting certain ways and they can even define who we are as people. But when we take a break from our busy lives and rest, does our brain do the same?

A 2016 study by Duke researchers tested whether neural models developed to categorize distinct emotional categories in an MRI brain scan would work with people who are in a resting state, meaning no activity is being done by the person physically or mentally.

An algorithm determined different patterns of brain activity that mapped to different emotional states.

When a person is active, emotions are usually a huge part of the ways they interact and the decisions they make, but this study led by Kevin LaBar a professor of psychology and neuroscience, wanted to see if changing the activity level to its minimum can cause different effects on the person and the emotions they experience.

They used a tool called functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) that allows scientists to measure brain activity by seeing the amount of blood flow to different areas in the brain. They were looking for universal emotions, those feelings that are understood in all cultures and societies as the same state of mind, such as contentment, amusement, surprise, fear, anger, sadness, and neutral.

Each emotion has been shown by fMRI to activate different portions of the brain. This is significant if a person is injured or has decreased activity level in a region of the brain, because it can change the ways they feel, act, and interact with others. It also can help to better understand why certain people have better visual recollection of memories, can recall certain information, even when in a sleeping or resting state.

This study consisted of two experiments. The first experiment included a large number of students recruited for a larger study by Ahmad Hariri, a professor of psychology and neuroscience. These healthy, young adult university students have been assessed on a wide range of behavioral and biological traits. For this experiment, they were told to stare at a blank gray screen and to rest while not thinking of anything particular while being scanned by the fMRI.

The second experiment was with a smaller sample of just 22 participants. Before going into the fMRI, they rated how they felt emotionally in an unconstrained resting state. Once in the machine, they were told to rest and let their mind wander and to think freely with the blank screen occasionally letting them rate their current state of emotion. By the end of the experiment, they completed 40 trials of rating how they felt, which consisted of 16 different emotions they could choose from.

The researchers tried to quantify the occurrence of different spontaneous emotional states in resting brains.

At the end of both experiments, the researchers tested the brain scans with an algorithm that categorized emotional arousal and brain activity. They found distinct patterns of activity in these resting minds that seemed to match various emotional states the students had reported. Prior to this study, there had only been experiments which test to see how the brain is stimulated in active people in a non-resting state.

Although this experiment was successful and helped the researchers understand a lot more about the emotional states of the brain, there were some limitations as well. One of the main biases of the self-report experiment was the high percentage of students reporting that they were experiencing amusement (23.45%) and contentment (46.31%) which the researchers suppose was students putting forth a more positive image of themselves to others. Another possible bias is that brain patterns might vary depending on the emotional status of an individual. Emotional processes unfolding at both long and short time scales likely contribute to spontaneous brain activity.

This study holds important clinical implications. Being able to ‘see’ emotional states in a resting brain would help us understand how important the feelings we experience are. With refinement, fMRI could become useful for diagnosing personality or mood disorders by showing us the brain areas being stimulated during certain periods of sadness, anger, and anxiety. Such applications could help with identifying emotional experiences in individuals with impaired awareness or compromised ability to communicate.

Guest post by Brynne O’Shea.

Are People Stuck with Their Political Views?

By Guest Post

On July 11, 2019

In Behavior/Psychology, Students

This is the fifth of eight blog posts written by undergraduates in PSY102: Introduction to Cognitive Psychology, Summer Term I 2019.

Whether you cheered or cried when Donald Trump was elected President, or if you stood in the blazing heat marching for women’s rights, your position on socio-political issues is important to you. Would you ever change it?

Psychologists have found that people tend to hold onto their views, even when presented with conflicting evidence. Is it ever worth your time to argue with the opposition, knowing that they will not budge from their stance?

A 2013 protest in Brussels. Picture by M0tty via wikimedia commons

Researchers from Duke University explored the idea that people stand with their positions on political and social matters, even when presented with affirming or conflicting evidence.

But they also offer hope that knowing that these cognitive biases exist and understanding how they work can help lead to more rational decision-making, open debate of socio-political issues, and fact-based discussion.

The stubbornness of people’s views are based on a couple of concepts. “Resistance to belief-change” is the idea that people will stand with their original views and are unwilling to change them. This could be a result of a cognitive bias known as the “confirmation bias.” The bias is that people will favor evidence that supports their claim and deny evidence that refutes their position.

An example of this would be a person who supports Donald Trump rating an article about how he is doing a great job more favorably as opposed to a non-supporter who would use evidence that shows he is doing a bad job. Whether their position is a supporter or non-supporter, they will use evidence that supports their position and will overlook any conflicting evidence.

This can be shown through the following 2019 experiment performed by the Duke team, which was led by Felipe De Brigard, a Duke assistant professor of philosophy and member of the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences.

This experiment started with a group of individuals across the spectrum of socio-economic and political interests. They were presented with five different socio-political issues: fracking, animal testing, drone strikes, standardized testing, and the gold standard. They started by reading background on the issue and then were to report any prior knowledge on these issues to eliminate people favoring information that they had previously encountered.

After reporting any prior knowledge, they were to make their decision and rate how confident they were in that decision. They were then tasked with evaluating only affirming evidence, only conflicting evidence, or evidence for both sides. After this, they gave their final decision about their stance on the issues.

The results showed that there was very little change in people’s positions after being presented with the evidence. For example, in the topic of fracking, about two in one-hundred people changed their position after being presented with affirming evidence. Also, when being presented with conflicting evidence, only one in five people changed their stance on the issue.

Similar changes were recorded with other issues and other sets of evidence. The results showed that receiving conflicting evidence caused people to change their position the most, but it was still a small percentage of people who changed their stance. This is significant because it shows how people are resistant to change because of their belief biases. Another interesting aspect is that participants rated evidence that affirmed their belief to be more favorable than those that conflicted it. This means they tended to use this evidence to support their stance and overlook conflicting evidence, which shows how cognitive biases, like the confirmation bias, play an important role in decision-making.

Cognitive bias affects how we make our decisions. More importantly, it entrenches our views and stops us from being open-minded. It is important to understand cognitive biases because they impact our choices and behavior. Becoming aware of biases like resistance to change, and the confirmation bias allows people to think independently and make decisions based off of rationale as well as emotion because they are aware of how these impact their decision making process.

We expect to act rationally, making decisions that are in our best interest. However, this is often not true of humans. However, having adequate information, including understanding the impact of biases on decision–making, can lead humans to make better judgements. The next step in decision making research is to understand how people can change their entrenched positions to eliminate biases like the confirmation bias and bring more fact-based, open debate to socio-political issues.

To borrow from President Obama’s campaign slogan, is that change you can believe in?

Guest Post by Casey Holman, psychology major.

Move Your Eyes and Wiggle Your Ears

By Guest Post

On July 8, 2019

In Behavior/Psychology, Students

This is the fourth of eight blog posts written by undergraduates in PSY102: Introduction to Cognitive Psychology, Summer Term I 2019.

Research by Duke University neuroscientists has uncovered that the eardrums move when the eyes do. Even without sound, simply moving your eyes side to side causes the eardrums to vibrate.

Because the vibrations and eye movements seem to start simultaneously, it seems as if both processes are controlled by the same parts of the brain, suggesting the same motor commands control both processes, according to senior author Jennifer Groh of psychology and neuroscience.

Her team used rhesus monkeys and humans in an experiment that has given us new understanding of how the brain pairs hearing and seeing.

This research could help shed light on the brain’s role in experiencing outside stimuli, such as sounds or lights, or even in understanding hearing disorders. Scientists still don’t understand the purpose of eardrum movement, however.

The experiment fitted sixteen participants with microphones small enough to fit into the ear canals, but also sensitive enough to pick up the eardrums’ vibrations. It is known that the eardrum can be controlled by the brain, and these movements help control the influx of sound from the outside and also produce small sounds called “otoacoustic emissions.” Thus, it is important to measure vibrations, as this would signify the movement of the eardrum.

LED lights were presented in front of the participants and they were asked to follow the lights with their eyes as they shifted side to side.

This experiment was also replicated in three rhesus monkeys, using five of the six total ears between them. These trials were conducted in the same way as the humans.

The researchers concluded that whenever the eyes move, the eardrums moved together to shift focus to the direction of sight. Vibrations began shortly before and lasted slightly after the eye movements, further suggesting the brain controls these processes together. As eye movements get bigger, they cause larger vibrations.

These relationships highlight an important void in previous research, as the simultaneous and even anticipatory action of nearly 10 milliseconds of eardrum vibrations show that the brain has more control in making the systems work together, using the same motor commands. The information being sent to the eardrums, therefore, likely contains information received from the eyes.

Perhaps immersive headphones or movie theaters could also take advantage of this by playing sounds linked to the movements of eyes and eardrums to create a more “realistic” experience.

While the relationship between side to side eye movements was analyzed for their effect on eardrum movement, the relationship between up and down eye movements has yet to be discovered. Hearing disorders, like being unable to focus on a specific sound when many are played at once, are still being investigated. Scientists hope to further understand the relationship the brain has with the audio and visual systems, and the relationship they have with each other.

Guest post by Benjamin Fiszel, Class of 2022.

Your Brain Likes YOU Most

By Guest Post

On July 3, 2019

In Behavior/Psychology, Students

This is the third of eight blog posts written by undergraduates in PSY102: Introduction to Cognitive Psychology, Summer Term I 2019.

Imagine you’re at a party. You have a few friends there, but the rest of the people you don’t know. You fiddle with the beaded bracelet around your wrist, take a breath, relax your arms, and walk in. You grab some pretzels and a drink, and talk to this guy named Richard. He has a daughter, or a niece, or something like that. His moustache looked weird.

Okay, now quick question: would you remember if he was wearing a bracelet or not? Odds are you wouldn’t unless he had a bracelet like yours. In fact, it turns out that we recall things far better when those things concern ourselves.

Research has shown us that when it comes to what we notice, the quickest thing to grab our attention will be something we relate to ourselves, such as a picture of your own face compared to a picture of any other face. What still remains unknown however, is to what extent our prioritization of self plays an internal role in our processes of memory and decision making.

To explore this, an international team of researchers led by Duke’s Tobias Egner analyzed the degree to which we prioritize self-related information by looking at how efficiently we encode and actively retrieve information we have deemed to concern ourselves.

They did this with a game. Research participants were shown three different colored circles that represented self, friend, and stranger. A pair of colored circles would appear in various locations on the screen, then vanish, followed by a black circle which appeared in the same or different location as one of the colored circles.

Participants were then asked if the black circle appeared at the same location where one of the colored circles had been. The responses were quite revealing.

People responded significantly quicker when the black circle was in the location of the circle labeled self, rather than friend or stranger. After variations of the experiment, the results still held. In one variation, the black circle would appear in the location of the self-circle only half as often as it did the others. But participants still recalled the quickest when the black circle appeared where their self-circle had been.

If the light blue dot is “you,” will you get the answer quicker?

With nothing but perception and reaction time, the process demonstrated that this is not a conscious decision we make, but an automatic response we have to information we consider our own.

The experiment demonstrated that when it comes to holding and retrieving information on demand, the self takes precedence. The interesting thing in this study however, is that the self-related stimulus in this experiment was not a picture of the person, or even the circle of their preferred color, it was simply the circle that the researchers assigned to the participant as self, it had nothing to do with the participants themselves. It was simply the participant’s association of that circle with themselves that made the information more important and readily available. It seems that to associate with self, is to bring our information closer.

The fact that we better recall things related to ourselves is not surprising. As creatures intended mostly to look after our own well-being, this seems quite an intuitive response by our working memory. However, if there is anything to take away from this experiment, it’s the significance of the colored circle labeled self. It was no different than any of the others circles, but merely making it ‘self’ improved the brain’s ability to recall and retrieve relevant information.

Simply associating things with ourselves makes them more meaningful to us.

Guest post by Kenan Kaptanoglu, Class of 2020.

Vulci 3000: Technology in Archaeology

By Anna Gotskind

On July 2, 2019

In Computers/Technology, Faculty, Field Research, Science Communication & Education, Students

This is Anna’s second post from a dig site in Italy this summer. Read the first one here.

Duke PhD Candidate Antonio LoPiano on Site

Once home to Etruscan and Roman cities, the ruins found at Vulci date to earlier than the 8th century B.C.E.

As archaeologists dig up the remains of these ancient civilizations, they are better able to understand how humans from the past lived their daily lives. The problem is, they can only excavate each site once.

No matter how careful the diggers are, artifacts and pieces of history can be destroyed in the process. Furthermore, excavations take a large amount of time, money and strenuous labor to complete. As a result, it’s important to carefully choose the location.

Map of the Vulci Landscape Created Using GIS Technology

In response to these challenges Dr. Maurizio Forte decided to supplement the excavation of ancient Vulci sites by using innovative non-invasive technologies.

Considering that it once housed entire cities, Vulci is an extremely large site. To optimize excavation time, money, and resources, Dr. Forte used technologies to predict the most important urban areas of the site. Forte and his team also used remote sensing which allowed them to interpret the site prior to digging.

Duke Post Doc Nevio Danelon Gathering Data for Photogrammetry

Having decided where on the site to look, the team was then able to digitally recreate both the landscape as well as the excavation trench in 3D. This allowed them to preserve the site in its entirety and uncover the history that lay below. Maps of the landscape are created using Web-GIS (Geographic Information Systems). These are then combined with 3D models created using photogrammetry to develop a realistic model of the site.

Forte decided to make the excavation entirely paperless. All “paperwork” on site is done on tablets. There is also an onsite lab that analyzes all of the archaeological discoveries and archives them into a digital inventory.

This unique combination of archaeology and technology allows Forte and his team to study, interpret and analyze the ancient Etruscan and Roman cities beneath the ground of the site in a way that has never been done before. He is able to create exact models of historic artifacts, chapels and even entire cities that could otherwise be lost for good.

Forte also thinks it is important to share what is uncovered with the public. One way he is doing this is through integrating the excavation with virtual reality applications.

I’m actually on site with Forte and the team now. One of my responsibilities is to take photos with the Insta360x which is compatible with the OculusGo, allowing people to experience what it’s like to be in the trench with virtual reality. The end goal is to create interactive applications that could be used by museums or individuals.

Ultimately, this revolutionary approach to archaeology brings to light new perspectives on historical sites and utilizes innovative technology to better understand discoveries made in excavations.

By: Anna Gotskind ’22

Putting Your Wandering Mind on a Leash

By Guest Post

On July 1, 2019

In Behavior/Psychology, Students

This is the second of eight blog posts written by undergraduates in PSY102: Introduction to Cognitive Psychology, Summer Term I 2019.

What should I eat for dinner? What do I need to do when I return home? What should I do this weekend? All three questions above are questions we frequently ask ourselves when we begin to mind-wander in class, at work, and even at home.

Mind-wandering has commonly been defined and recognized as the unconscious process of getting distracted from a task at hand. Thus, mind-wandering has garnered a fairly negative connotation due to it being viewed as an uncontrollable phenomenon. But what if I told you that recent research shows that not only can we control our mind wandering with the presence of an upcoming task, but we can do so on a moment-to-moment basis as well?

Illustration by Charlie Taylor @c.e.b.t. (http://www.mylittleplaceofcalm.com/the-wonderings-of-a-wandering-mind/)

And if we can indeed modulate and directly control our minds, can we find ways to mind-wander that would ultimately optimize our productivity? Could we potentially control our off-topic thoughts without seeing a loss in overall performance of a task?

To answer these questions, Harvard postdoc Paul Seli, who is now an assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke, and his team conducted a fascinating experiment. They knew from earlier work that our minds tend to wander more while completing easier tasks than difficult ones. Why? Because we simply need to use fewer executive resources to perform easy tasks and thus we can freely mind-wander without noticing a loss in performance. In fact, one could say that we are optimizing our executive functions and resources across a variety of different tasks instead of just one.

Seli hypothesized that people could control their mind wandering on the basis of their expectations of upcoming challenges in a task. To test this, he had research participants sit in front of a computer screen that showed a large analog clock. Researchers told each participant to click on the spacebar every time the clock struck 12:00. Seems simple right? Even simpler, the clock struck 12:00 every 20 seconds and thus it was completely predictable. To incentivize the participants to click the spacebar on time, a bonus payment was awarded for every correct response.

Paul Seli studies…
What were we talking about?

During some of the 20-second intervals, the participants were presented with what are called “thought probes.” These popped up on the screen to ask the participants whether or not their mind had just been wandering.

The participants were assured that their responses did not affect their bonus payments and the probes were presented above a paused clock face so that the participants still saw where the hand of the clock was while answering the question. Participants could either respond by clicking “on task” (meaning that they were focusing on the clock), “intentionally mind-wandering” (meaning that they were purposely thinking about something off-topic), or “unintentionally mind-wandering.” After a response was given, the question disappeared, and the clock resumed.

By using the thought probes to track the mind-wandering of participants on a second-by-second basis, Seli found that the participants tended to decrease their levels of mind-wandering as the clock approached 12:00. In other words, participants would freely mind-wander in the early stages of the hand’s rotation and then quickly refocus on the task at hand as the clock approached 12:00.

Seli showed that we have some ability to control a wandering mind. Instead of mind-wandering being solely dependent on the difficulty of the task, Seli found that we can control our mind-wandering on a moment-to-moment basis as the more difficult or pressing aspect of the task approaches.

Even if we are distracted, we have the ability to refocus when the task at hand becomes pressing. However, there is a time and place for mind-wandering and multitasking, and we should certainly not get too confident with our mind-wandering abilities.

Take mind-wandering and distracted driving for example. Approximately nine Americans are killed each day due to distracted driving and more than 1,000 people are injured. Therefore, just because you are overly familiar with a task does not mean that it’s not crucial and demanding. Thus, we shouldn’t undervalue the amount of executive resources and attention we need to focus and stay safe.

So, the next time you catch yourself thinking about your upcoming weekend, chances are that the task your completing isn’t too pressing, because if it were, you’d be using up all of your executive resources to focus.

Guest post by Jesse Lowey, Trinity 2021