THE WASPS AND THE BRAINS

FROM:  NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION
Tiny brains, but shared smarts
Unlike humans and other vertebrates, the brains of wasps shrink when they're socialized--but they might 'share' brainpower

A solitary wasp--the kind that lives and forages for food alone--has a fairly small brain. Type out a lowercase letter in 10-point text and you'll get an idea of its size.

But tiny as that brain is, its social cousins, living together in honeycombed nests, have even smaller ones. And that size difference might provide some key information about the difference between insect societies and vertebrate societies.

Biologists have studied the societies of vertebrates--from flocks of birds, to schools of fish, to communities of humans--enough to come up with something called the "social brain hypothesis." Generally, it goes something like this: Social interaction presents challenges that require a lot of brain power, as that interaction requires organisms to navigate complicated territory, including avoiding conflict and building alliances.

Therefore, vertebrates that live in societies have bigger brains. The more complex the organism's society, the bigger its brain regions for processing complex information will be. Scientists believe the complexity of human societies may be one of the reasons we have such large, developed brains.

Sean O'Donnell, a biology professor at Drexel, has spent almost the entirety of his more than 20-year career studying wasps. He says these picnic terrors--actually critical members of the insect world that prey on pest species--represent ideal candidates for seeing whether that hypothesis applies to insects, because they have so much variation.

Some wasps are solitary. Some live in small, primitive groups. Others live in larger, more complex societies. "There are lots of intermediate stages," O'Donnell said.

When O'Donnell, with support from the National Science Foundation's Directorate for Biological Sciences, looked at the brains in 29 related species of wasps spanning the social spectrum, he found that living in a society did indeed affect the size of their brains. It just made them smaller, instead of bigger.

His findings are described in the latest issue of Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

"If our data is verified, it suggests that there's something really different about how insect societies formed," he said.

O'Donnell's work focused on the "mushroom bodies" of the wasps' brains, structures that are superficially similar to the regions of vertebrate brains that deal with higher cognitive functions.

His research uncovered another interesting difference from vertebrates: the complexity of the wasps' societies seemed to have no significant effect on the size of their brains. The big dropoff in size occurred between solitary and social wasps. In contrast, the brains of wasps in simple societies showed no significant size differences between those in complex societies.

"That suggests to me that going from solitary to a small society is the significant transition," O'Donnell said.

'Sharing' brainpower

Part of what makes vertebrate societies so brain-intensive is that they usually involve groups of organisms with different agendas that aren't related to one another--most of the people you know aren't members of your family.

Insect societies, however, are made up of groups of cooperating close relatives with shared objectives. Wasps might not need the type of brainpower required for social interaction because there's much less of it in their nests and colonies. The insects cooperate and rely on each other without the type of negotiation that can be required in vertebrate societies.

But what advantage could a smaller, less complex brain offer a species? As O'Donnell puts it, "Brains are expensive."

Neural tissues require more energy to develop and maintain than almost any other kind, and biologists have found that natural selection will find the optimal balance between the metabolic costs of developing particular areas of the brain and the benefits yielded.

In some ways, the social wasps may "share" brainpower. Individually, their brains might not stack up to their solitary relatives, but the colony as a whole is "smart."

O'Donnell says the next steps for his work will replicate the wasp research with termites and bees, which also offer a variety of social complexity.

"We would expect to see similar patterns," he said.

Learn more in this Drexel University video on Sean O'Donnell's work.

-- Rob Margetta
Investigators
Sean O'Donnell
Related Institutions/Organizations
Drexel University

RESEARCH SHOWS MEDIA EXPOSURE TO TERROR MAY INCREASE STRESS RELATED SYMPTOMS

FROM:  NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION
Responding to terror (again): A study of the Boston Marathon bombing
Media exposure to prior tragedies may sensitize people to new disasters

The city of Boston endured one of the worst terrorist attacks on U.S. soil in April 2013, when two pressure-cooker bombs exploded near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. While emergency workers responded to the chaos and law enforcement agencies began a manhunt for the perpetrators, Americans fixed their attention to television screens, Internet news sites and forums, and Twitter, Facebook and other social media.

In doing so, some of those people may have been raising their acute stress levels, with a corresponding increase in symptoms such as difficulty sleeping, a sense of emotional numbness, or re-experiencing their trauma. Such responses, exhibited shortly after exposure to a trauma, have been linked with long-term negative health effects.

A trio of researchers in psychology and social behavior and nursing science at the University of California (UC), Irvine--supported by the Social Psychology Program in the National Science Foundation's (NSF) Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Directorate--released a paper last year finding that for some individuals, intense exposure to the Boston marathon bombing through media coverage could be associated with more stress symptoms than those who had direct exposure to the attack. Their latest research article, published this month, finds that the likelihood of those symptoms developing also increases with multiple exposures to prior trauma.

In other words, the more hours you spend following disasters and tragedies in the media, the more sensitized you may become.

"Media-based exposure to these large, collective traumas--these community disasters--can have cumulative effects on people," said Dana Rose Garfin, one of the paper's authors. "More prior indirect exposures are associated with higher stress responses following subsequent traumatic events."

Garfin, E. Alison Holman and Roxane Cohen Silver used survey results from residents of metropolitan Boston and New York City collected within weeks of the Marathon bombing to examine the relationship between how they responded to the attack and their media-based exposure to three previous traumatic events: the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Superstorm Sandy and the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting.

"We were able to specifically explore the accumulation of exposure to collective disasters," Silver said. "We looked at three different, collective events to which people on the East Coast--and in particular New York and Boston--have been exposed."

The researchers looked at levels of acute stress in Boston and New York residents within a month after the marathon bombing. The Boston residents were much closer to that act of terrorism, but the researchers did not find that proximity necessarily correlated with higher stress levels. According to their report, New Yorkers already had somewhat heightened stress levels, due to their exposure to Superstorm Sandy, 9/11 and the Sandy Hook shooting, making their responses to the Marathon bombing comparable to those of Bostonians.

These findings do not imply that merely reading one article or watching a single program about a community trauma will necessarily increase stress. The research team's first paper found that acute stress symptoms increased as the number of hours per day of bombing-related media exposure in the week following the bombing increased. People who reported three or more hours per day of media exposure reported higher stress symptoms than those who reported less than one hour per day, and individuals who reported six or more hours a day reported the highest levels of symptoms.

Their latest paper also notes that the effects of cumulative indirect trauma exposure aren't universal.

"There's variability in how this happens," Holman said. "And that's another research question that has to be addressed--to understand what leads to those differences, why some people have sensitivities and others don't."

There are other limits on the findings. The data were correlational--they showed a relationship between increased media exposure to traumatic events and the development of stress symptoms, but they don't provide a direct causal link. Still, based on the evidence the researchers have reviewed thus far, coupled with the findings from a similar study they conducted about exposure to media after the 9/11 attacks, the team members have recommendations for news consumers.

"My recommendation is to turn off the TV and not expose yourself too much through social media or other media sources," Holman said. "Find out what you need to know from the news, but don't overexpose yourself."

Garfin emphasized that overexposure is the key factor.

"I wouldn't say don't stay informed or tune out the news," she said. "It's the repeated exposure to things, which probably isn't giving you new information. We're not saying turn off the TV totally. Stay informed, then go on with your daily life."

The researchers are likely to yield much more in the way of results on the topic. The latest paper represents the first wave of data collection they performed. There are four more following. Their next article, they said, will examine how specific types of media--such as television or social media--are associated with acute stress levels.

-- Robert J. Margetta,
Investigators
Dana Rose Garfin
Ellen Holman
Roxane Silver

NSF VIDEO: THINKING CAPS?

NSF-FUNDED PSYCHOLOGISTS LOOK TO UNDERSTAND HOW KIDS THINK

FROM:  NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION 

Harvard University psychologists seek to unlock secrets of children's complex thinking

Study aims to uncover processes that help improve theoretical knowledge
What is it about the human mind, as opposed to those of other animals, that makes it able to comprehend and reason about complex concepts such as infinity, cancer or protons?

That is what National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded research conducted by Harvard University professors Susan Carey and Deborah Zaitchik seeks to find out.

The two investigators are leading a new project that explores how children develop understanding of abstract concepts over time, specifically in mathematics and in science--biology, psychology and physics. Their research could prove transformative to the practice of education.

Carey and Zaitchik's project, "Executive Function and Conceptual Change," is one of 40 projects funded in the first round of an NSF initiative called INSPIRE that address extremely complicated and pressing scientific problems.

Specifically, the project aims to determine how children develop theoretical concepts of science and math and how the learning process might be modified to increase their level of understanding.

NSF's Developmental and Learning Sciences Program in its Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences partially funds the research. It is one item in a program portfolio that strives to understand how children learn, and what factors influence their social and thinking skills as they become productive members of society.

Past research shows children have intuitive theories about science and math before they begin formal learning. Their intuitive theories are often radically different from the theories taught in school, but through schoolwork, are transformed into standard, often abstract ideas that were previously unknown to the students.

For example, children believe the earth is flat and draw conclusions about the world based on that assumption. When they become aware the world is round, they must update their knowledge about the shape of the earth and also update the kinds of conclusions they can draw about the world in light of this new information, such as that it is impossible to fall off its edge.

This transformation involves what Carey and Zaitchik call conceptual change--a process by which a person's knowledge and beliefs are modified over time and evolve into a new conceptual system of interconnected knowledge and reasoning.

Conceptual change is extremely difficult to achieve. Studies show it requires more than gathering new facts to replace or modify old facts; it demands, in addition, sustained mental effort to integrate all related pieces of information into a coherent body of knowledge.

"The kind of knowledge we are talking about is hard to construct," says Carey, a Harvard psychologist and the project's lead principal investigator. "You just don't get it for free."

The difficulty of conceptual change is one of the reasons teaching science and math is such a challenge. It is also a reason the Research on Education and Learning program within NSF's Directorate for Education and Human Resources co-funds the project.

Carey and Zaitchik believe that if the cognitive processes needed to produce conceptual change can be identified, better understood and successfully manipulated through simple training, it might make a big difference in a student's academic success, whether that student is in kindergarten or college.

They are especially concerned with how a suite of cognitive processes called "executive function" impacts children's ability to both build new abstract knowledge and use it throughout their lifetimes.

The components of executive function under investigation by the research team include working memory, inhibitory control and set-shifting. Working memory involves the ability to actively hold information in mind, update it and mentally work with it. Inhibitory control is the ability to suppress interference, distractions and inappropriate responses, which is important for completing cognitive tasks. Set-shifting involves the ability to flexibly switch goals or modes of operation, such as recognizing that different problem-solving approaches will be more successful in different settings.

Previous research has shown that executive function is more predictive of school readiness than entry-level reading skills, entry-level math skills or IQ. In addition, executive function has been shown to play an important role throughout a person's school years, with working memory and inhibitory control independently predicting math and reading score success in every grade from preschool through high school.

Carey and Zaitchik say there is already a good deal of empirical evidence that these processes play a strong role in school children's ability to learn and express theoretical knowledge that does not require conceptual change. In this project, however, they are testing the hypothesis that executive function also underlies the ability to achieve conceptual change.

"For cognitive change, one needs to 'think outside the box,' look at things differently from the way one had been looking at them," says Adele Diamond, one of the founders of the field of developmental cognitive neuroscience and an expert on executive function. "To get to that point, it helps to be able to try out different perspectives and experiment with looking at things this way and that.

"Playing with ideas, relating things in new ways relies heavily on working memory," she says referencing one component of executive function examined in Carey's and Zaitchik's research project. Additionally, "to think in new ways, to see things in new ways, one needs to inhibit old ways of seeing things, old habits," she notes referencing inhibitory control, which the project leaders are also examining.

Diamond is an outside project observer at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, where she is the Tier 1 Canada Research Chair for Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience within the Psychiatry Department there.

Work by Diamond and her colleagues provides a backdrop for Carey's and Zaitchik's approach. In pioneering research, Diamond found school activities in early childhood--including play--could improve children's executive function and better their performance on standard academic testing. Her research also shows executive function can be improved in 4-5 year olds, ages that some researchers had thought was too early to try to improve executive function.

Carey and Zaitchik are conducting several experiments that explore how executive function relates to conceptual change. They are interested in exploring the possibility that providing training to enhance executive function can also facilitate conceptual change. They are also exploring whether diminished executive functioning might explain science and math difficulties in children at risk for school failure. (For more information on these studies see the article titled "Unlocking the secrets of children's complex thinking: the studies")

They are testing the hypothesis that executive function underlies the ability to achieve conceptual change in two very different groups. The first group is children who are engaged in new learning of specific science and math theories. The second group is healthy elderly adults who, despite decades of experience holding and using the theories involved, nonetheless make many of the same errors in reasoning that children do.

"This work has the potential to support and promote executive function in children in ways that will have broad and deep impacts on their learning and achievement," says Laura Namy, Developmental and Learning Sciences program director at NSF, pinning the research to important child development priorities.

Moreover, the research could have far-reaching importance to populations with particularly weak executive function, such as children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, a population also studied in the project, as well as disadvantaged children, aging adults and patients with Alzheimer's disease.

"That executive function enhancement can directly impact a mental process so far downstream as conceptual reasoning is potentially extraordinarily transformative," says Namy. "It implies that a relatively straightforward intervention, such as executive function training, has the potential to ‘level the playing field' for children from disadvantaged backgrounds, for those with attention deficits and those experiencing age- and disease-related cognitive decline."

The relationship between executive function and conceptual change appears to be powerful, she says. "The goal of this investigation is to begin to discover why."

-- Bobbie Mixon, (
Investigators
Susan Carey
Deborah Zaitchik
Related Institutions/Organizations
Harvard University
Related Programs
Developmental and Learning Sciences
Related Awards
#1247396 INSPIRE: Executive Function and Conceptual Change
Years Research Conducted
2012 - 2017

Total Grants
$799,862

GLIAL CELLS AND THE BRAIN

FROM:  NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION 

The beautiful brain cells you don't know about

Hint: They're not neurons

The number of nerve cells in the human brain sounds impressive: 100 billion. And it is.

But neurons may make up as little as 15 percent of cells in the brain. The other cells are called glial cells, or glia.

Glia are the rising stars of the neuroscience universe. Once delegated to simply a supporting role for neurons, these cells are now thought to play an important part in early brain development, learning and memory.

A 2013 workshop funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) enabled researchers who study learning and memory to get together (many for the first time) and reconsider glia's function.

"It was paradigm-shifting," said R. Douglas Fields, a neurobiologist at the National Institutes of Health and meeting organizer. "Everyone left enthused about the enormous potential for understanding brain function, especially learning and memory by studying how all the cells in the brain work together, rather than focusing exclusively on neurons."

In fact, Fields and other brain researchers who specialize in glia have since called for a greater focus on non-neuronal cells as part of the BRAIN Initiative, a collaborative research project announced by the Obama administration in April 2013.

When you learn something, how to catch a ball or use an equation, information is transmitted along the spindly arms of neurons via electrical signals. At the same time, glia called oligodendrocytes work to insulate these particular arms with a fatty substance called myelin so the information flows more efficiently.

Some studies show that glial cells known as astrocytes may have an even more active role in learning. Astrocytes may release chemicals that strengthen newly formed connections between neurons, making it more likely you'll be able to remember a new face, or the name of your co-worker's beloved golden retriever.

Understanding how we learn requires that scientists and engineers take a holistic approach to brain research.

NSF-funded research centers such as the Center of Excellence for Learning in Education, Science and Technology and the Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center integrate experimentation, modeling and technical application to help us understand what's really going on inside the brain. And to use that knowledge to educate students and to build intelligent technologies.

-- Sarah Bates, NSF