Active Research Grants

This study expands on an ongoing NIMH-funded grant to validate a redesigned assessment, the remote RISE Communication Play Protocol (RISE CPP), to measure social communication and diagnose autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The RISE CPP can be administered at home by a caregiver, with remote coaching from a researcher or clinician. If found to be valid, the RISE CPP can reduce barriers to diagnosing ASD and can be used by researchers as a measure of children’s social communication.

This research is to be conducted by Dr. Gregg Muragishi, with sponsor Dr. Sapna Cheryan. This project investigates whether microinclusions improve organizational outcomes for women, including women of color, in tech companies, as mediated by sense of fit; and distinguishes microinclusions from other inclusive treatment. It will test an intervention to establish, convey, and reinforce company norms of microinclusions and examine whether the intervention increases their employees’ fit, motivation, job satisfaction, company trust, performance, and retention.

This study measures brain organization/connectivity. It is an early Phase II randomized controlled trial to obtainpreliminary data on mechanisms and efficacy of a hearing aid-based intervention to prevent cognitive decline in those atrisk for Alzheimer’s Disease and Alzheimer’s Disease Related Dementias.

This project builds upon our existing infrastructure for large-scale studies of adult serious mental illnesses serious mental illness SMI in the region to establish a new cohort of 3,000 children and early adolescents at elevated or low risk for SMI. Study findings will clarify the associations between genomic risk profile and premorbid clinical markers of psychopathology; clarify the relative power of genetic versus clinical, neurobehavioral, and environmental factors for predicting clinical outcomes; and establish a unique resource for the scientific community for rich longitudinal investigation for years to come, and quantify the relative power of genetic versus clinical and neurobehavioral characteristics for predicting clinical outcomes.

The Auditory Neuroscience Training Program, established in 2002, helps train basic neuroscience researchers in clinical disciplines. Trainees participate in research programs in neuroanatomy, development, genetics, cell and molecular biology, neuropharmacology, and electrophysiology of the peripheral and central auditory system as well as psychoacoustics, language perception and processing, and communication behavior. They have the opportunity to combine research through collaborative efforts.

This project will provide new insights into the development of spatial skills and their relation to STEM achievement in order to best set students up for success. Alongside this research is a plan to provide intensive research experience for undergraduate students and a plan to create a bidirectional relation between community participation in research and scientific outreach activities.

This study proposes that oxytocin may enhance social safety learning in women with social anxiety disorder, a common psychiatric disorder characterized by significant social fear.

This UW subaward project will set up and help run sound playback experiments where female midshipman fish are exposed to recorded male midshipman advertisement calls vs. controls, and will measure female behavioral response (phonotaxis) to synthesized advertisement call.

This K99R00 award to postdoc Marilyn Piccirillo provides training in passive sensing data collection methods and conduct of clinical trials, as well as continued training in alcohol research. The K99 phase builds on expertise constructing person-specific models and identifying person-specific factors testing self-medication models of AARD-AUP, to develop a method for personalizing a CBT skills-based intervention.

This study tests the effect of intranasal oxytocin or matching placebo on the brain mechanisms underlying vicarious extinction learning using a novel task developed by our collaborators.

This project supports the Sixth International Conference on “The Effects of Noise on Aquatic Life” in Berlin, Germany, July 10-15, 2022 (https://an2022.org/). The effects of sound on aquatic life is a complex scientific area involving a variety of highly specialized disciplines such as theoretical physics and acoustics (e.g. numerical modeling of sounds waves), animal behavior and physiology, engineering (e.g. development of mitigation measures), and environmental policy. Normally, there is very little opportunity for scientists from these disciplines to meet and listen to one another and, perhaps even more importantly, develop collaborations to solve problems with regard to the effects of sound on aquatic life using their complementary skills.

This project supports the Sixth International Conference on “The Effects of Noise on Aquatic Life” in Berlin, Germany, July 10-15, 2022 (https://an2022.org/).The effects of sound on aquatic life is a complex scientific area involving a variety of highly specialized disciplines such as theoretical physics and acoustics (e.g. numerical modeling of sounds waves), animal behavior and physiology, engineering (e.g. development of mitigation measures), and environmental policy. Normally, there is very little opportunity for scientists from these disciplines to meet and listen to one another and, perhaps even more importantly, develop collaborations to solve problems with regard to the effects of sound on aquatic life using their complementary skills.

This ALACRITY (Advanced Laboratories for Accelerating the Reach and Impact of Treatments for Youth and Adults with Mental Illness) Center goal is to improve evidence-based practices. It develops an open-source, database of methods and guidelines for strategies that can be utilized by practitioners and researchers.

This project provides mechanistic insights into the neurotypical processes impacted by genetic risk for schizophrenia and has the potential to inform biologically valid subtypes of SCZ with distinct developmental trajectories.

The ability to represent abstract concepts sets humans apart from all other animals. For example, although we cannot see or touch time, we possess rich temporal representations. What enables this cognitive feat? As evidenced by language, gesture, and cultural artifacts, people from cultures around the world tend to borrow from the domain of space to represent time. By thinking about time in terms of space, we are able to ground our representations of an abstract domain in a more concrete one. These space-time associations provide adults with robust temporal representations that support reasoning about and memory for temporal order. To what extent might these associations be a product of our biology versus a cultural invention? To answer this question, we will use implicit looking time and pupillometry measures to explore the origins and developmental trajectory of space-time associations beginning in the first few days after birth and extending into adulthood.

This project will provide the first, detailed trajectories of how fast memory declines over time in healthy aging and in different forms of dementia. The trajectory of the rate of forgetting will be used to analyze MRI data, producing precise associations between different types of memory loss and different types of brain damage.

The research aims to answer two questions: (1) Do first-generation college students sleep for less time and have lower quality sleep than their peers whose parents have attended college? and (2) Does a lower sense of school belonging help to explain the relationship between being a first-generation college student and these less healthy sleep patterns? Objective sleep data will be collected from a sample of 300 undergraduates (half first-generation college students) via actiwatches, which are devices worn on the wrist that measure sleep patterns via an accelerometer. In addition, participants will complete questionnaires that assess their self-reported sleep quality and duration, their sense of belonging in school, and other psychosocial characteristics. The proposed work will be part of a larger research program aimed at understanding sleep disparities and ultimately developing interventions to reduce them.

Within a decade, many blind individuals are likely to be offered a wide range of options for sight restoration - including electronic prostheses, gene therapy and optogenetics. However the vision provided by almost all of these technologies will differ substantially from normal sight. The question of this proposal is – What role can cortical plasticity play in helping patients make use of the artificial visual input provided by sight recovery technology?

The University of Washington Developmental AIDS Research Center for Mental Health, based in Seattle, catalyzes new mental health and HIV research and develops new research leaders across the multidisciplinary spectrum of clinical, epidemiologic, statistical, behavioral, and implementation science expertise necessary to bend the curve of the global HIV epidemic. Our team blends expertise in HIV prevention, care and treatment, management of complex patients with HIV and co-morbidities, models of mental health care delivery in primary care, user-centered design for effective deployment of evidence-based psychological interventions in diverse care settings, care for co-morbid traumatic stress and substance use disorders, management of co-occurring mental disorders and other medical conditions, and rigorous quantitative methods for social science research. We bring experience in the conduct of impactful research with partners in regional and global HIV care settings and through the work of our four Cores we aim to catalyze and support innovative and impactful research to curb the HIV epidemic, with a focus on integrated intervention strategies that address HIV and mental disorders.

We have been responsible for implementing the monitoring and management of the Mariana crow (Corvus kubaryi) on Rota, Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI) since 2005. Funding from the CNMI’s section 6 award is contracted to UW to run the program. The proposed project is requesting to address three Priority 1 Recovery Actions in the draft recovery plan that will also benefit the ongoing captive rear and release program run by the Zoological Society of San Diego. Funding will support experienced staff required to search for and monitor nests at an island-wide scale which will complete a direct count of the breeding pairs on Rota during the 2021-2022 breeding season and will also benefit the rear and release program by identifying previously unknown territories from which to collect eggs, thereby potentially increasing genetic representation in the captive cohort.

The proposed research study will use passive mobile sensing data in a large ambulatory assessment sample of regular drinkers, to develop models linking passive mobile sensing data with predictors of drinking episodes (such as stress, social context, and impulsiveness) and the drinking episodes themselves.

This project employs a combination of behavioral-experimental and semi-structured interview methods to understand interpretation and use of evolving probabilistic tornado forecast information by members of the public, with a focus on the southeastern U.S. population. Working closely with our NOAA collaborators, our findings will be used to develop actionable, evidence-based recommendations for evolving probabilistic tornado forecast communication.

The Mariana Crow Recovery Team has identified determining sources of juvenile and adult mortality as a critical need. Population modeling indicates that low juvenile and adult survival are likely the primary drivers in the current population decline and a major obstacle to overcome for recovery (Ha et al., 2008). We are currently monitoring sources of mortality, habitat use and home range size, and dispersal in juveniles. Other tasks such as nest searching, capture and banding, bird surveys, and education and outreach are also required.We are also involved in tracking recovered and released individuals back into the wild population. We are working with the local and federal government, as well as San Diego Zoo on a rear and release program. In summary, we have now shifted our immediate research emphasis towards monitoring the status of the wild population and using science and technology to intervene to save the species.

Exposure to destabilizing, stressful life events is common, ranging from 50-89.5% in the U.S. population. The impact of such events is both psychological, such as anxiety and depression symptoms, and physiological, with activation of sympathetic nervous system and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal-cortical system. PTSD and depression both have strong etiologic links to stressful life events, share common distress-related symptoms, often co-occur (upwards of 60%), and are associated with impairment and reduction in disease-adjusted years of life. Evidence based psychotherapies for PTSD and depression are helpful for many. However, these interventions also have significant dropout and a large minority of individuals who are left with debilitating symptoms and are vulnerability to relapse upon future stressors. Current treatments typically focus on specific disorders rather than on common mechanisms maintain psychopathology and do not target adaptive mechanisms. Decades of experimental and prospective studies have identified central maladaptive and adaptive processes associated with persistent psychopathology or recovery following stressful, destabilizing events. These processes include: 1) unproductive/constructive event processing (e.g., re-experiencing, rumination, overgeneralization); 2) avoidance/approach (e.g., blunting, disengagement) and 3) anhedonia/reward (e.g., loss of pleasure). These processes prolong negative mood, interfere with adaptive coping and processing of emotional material, and increase sensitivity to future stressful life events. We have developed an intervention, Positive Processes and Transition to Health (PATH) that directly targets maladaptive processes (unproductive processing, avoidance, and anhedonia), while also teaching parallel adaptive skills (constructive processing, approach, and reward seeking). Six, 90-min sessions target individuals who have experienced a destabilizing life stressor and have persistent stress-related symptoms. PATH utilizes systematic event processing (revisiting, discussing), focusing repeatedly on the identified destabilizing life event, positive life events, and future events to teach adaptive processing skills. In a small open trial, we will examine whether PATH engages proposed targets. Next, we will conduct a randomized trial of PATH compared to waitlist control and assess patients over a three-month period. We are interested in improving both stressor-related psychopathology and potentially influencing stress-related markers of immune functioning and neural plasticity (brain-derived neurotrophic factor, BDNF, a significant factor driving brain changes in response to and recovery from stress). Stress related psychopathology is common, impairing and very costly. Evidence based treatments leave substantial room for improvement. Our mechanism based intervention has the potential to improve outcomes and reduce burden with substantial public health impact.

This project examines how cultural stereotypes dissuade girls from developing an interest in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields, and whether a novel treatment (i.e., teaching a growth mindset) can reduce the impact of stereotypes on sense of belonging and efficacy in computer science, and thereby increase girls’ interest in computer science.

We will be studying the neural circuits in the brain that integrate and process complex sensory information to guide natural behaviors. These studies will have applicability to psychiatric disorders that involve deficits in sensory integration, such as schizophrenia and autism spectrum disorders. They will also provide insight into the cognitive deficits seen in pathological conditions such as Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease.

Key mechanisms behind global warming are misunderstood or understood in ways that lead people to endorse ineffective solutions, wait-and-see strategies or no action at all. We argue that these misunderstandings are due to cognitive simplifications (e.g. focusing on superficial features and correlational relationships among them) that are inherent in the human cognitive architecture. In contrast, core attributes of scientific knowledge and expertise include appreciating underlying causal mechanisms as well as the ability to make conceptual distinctions such as the difference between CO2 emissions and common air pollutants. Therefore a primary challenge for science communication is to provide explanations of key scientific issues that are targeted at the way people process information and shift non-experts’ focus from superficial features to deeper level causal thinking, but are still simple. Much remains to learn about how to communicate science effectively, especially for contentious topics like climate change. As a recent National Academies report noted, most people don’t think much about science unless it impinges on their own decisions. When they do think about complex scientific issues, people tend to use shortcuts, deal with uncertainty differently than do scientists, and more readily accept information consistent with their priors. Prior attitudes and mental models have a powerful effect on how people find, filter, and make sense of scientific information. An essential first step in successful science communication is thus to understand how people think about and process complex information. For climate change and other politically charged topics, this requires understanding how they process information in a political charged domain. This knowledge is necessary to design communication strategies that improve understanding to support decision making, and are also robust against manipulation. However, understanding of how these processes play out in specific science communication contexts remains incomplete. To help fill this gap, the project proposed here will test science communication strategies targeting specific cognitive processing mechanisms, with an emphasis on those that lead to misunderstandings serving to reduce the perceived seriousness of climate change and the urgency of responding to it. In a set of survey experiments, we investigate whether targeted communication strategies influence individual reasoning, attitudes, emotions, and willingness to take action, in the context of climate change. Simplification is inherent in almost all science communication. The exact form of simplification is key, especially with controversial topics. This is because some simplifications may confuse people, or worse, may be exploited to mislead them, and thereby influence the perceived seriousness of the problem. It is clear that vested interests use this very strategy to promote doubt. There is considerable evidence suggesting that people hold simplified beliefs about climate change that may lead them to: (a) be susceptible to misleading information about climate change; (b) endorse ineffective, wait-and-see, or no strategies to address climate change; and (c) reduce their interest and attention to climate change. Three such widely held simplifications are: (1) greenhouse gases are the same as common air pollution (i.e., smog, particulate matter); (2) a decreasing rate of emissions means decreasing greenhouse gas concentrations (rate matching); and (3) current climate variability is due entirely to “natural” climate variability. This project tests communications strategies designed to replace these simplifications.

This proposal extends an existing program of research funded by CSOL entitled “Learning Complex Cognitive Skills: Bridging Neuroscience and Education through Individual Differences Research.” One of the most recent, and novel findings of this research is that the neurocognitive predictors of natural language learning in adulthood predicted up to 72% of the variance in learning to program in Python. Among these predictors were characterizations of resting-state brain activity, which provided tremendous predictive utility both for learning natural languages and learning to program in Python, with both considerable overlap and differences in the predictors of each skill. These findings are both novel and important, as the ability to program computers has moved from a niche skill to one that is of increasing centrality to all fields of science and technology. Over the past decade, the nature of programming languages has also rapidly evolved, and many have come to increasingly resemble the structure and form of natural languages. Thus, the goal of this new proposal will be to extend our understanding of the similarities and differences in the neurocognitive bases of learning to program and learning natural languages. In doing so, we will continue to adopt a neuropsychometric approach, extending our ability to map characteristics of individual brains at rest to complex skill learning. Four interrelated aims will be addressed: (1) to investigate the role of natural language experience on learning to program; (2) to explore the extent to which language-based pre-training versus non-linguistic programming pre-training may facilitate learning to program in Python, (3) to compare the neurocognitive predictors of learning programming languages that vary in their structural similarity to natural languages (e.g., R versus Python); and (4) to understand the degree of specificity versus generality of neurocognitive measures of language aptitude. The results of this proposed program of research will significantly increase our understanding of the nature of individual differences in learning computer programming languages. They will also more broadly facilitate our efforts to improve both assessment and training of complex skills.

Despite strong consensus that early, specialized intervention for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) can have a dramatic impact on outcomes, the public health system’s capacity to provide such services is severely challenged by the rapid rise in ASD prevalence. The goal of this research is to increase timely and equitable access to ASD-specialized early intervention during the critical first three years of life by capitalizing on the existing infrastructure of the Part C Early Intervention (EI) system, which is publicly funded and available in all U.S. States. This project will train EI providers to use an evidence-based, inexpensive, parent-mediated intervention that can improve child and family outcomes as well as mitigate the substantial economic costs associated with ASD.

The natural process of aging is also the leading risk factor for Alzheimer’s disease (AD), a prevalent form of dementia that has devastating effects on the quality of human life and health care costs. As cognitive functions progressively deteriorate with AD, a neurobiological understanding of how AD alters brain cells and their circuit functions is one of the great challenges facing modern biomedical research with broad implications for advancing the nation’s health as well as stimulating the economy. Considerable human and animal AD research has focused on relating ‘physical’ (macroscopic, microscopic) changes in the brain with destructive loss of memory (i.e., anterograde and retrograde amnesias). In contrast, significantly less is known about the impact of AD on other cognitive functioning, such as risky decision-making which plays pervasive role in daily life, and how AD-afflicted neurons operate in ‘real-time’ as cognitive functioning is taking place. The primary goal of this application is to understand the dynamics of prelimbic cortex-hippocampus (PL-HPC) circuit functions in decision-making in a murine model of AD, utilizing an ecologically-relevant behavioral paradigm. We will test the general hypothesis that AD causes coordinated PL-HPC neural activities and risky decision-making abilities to decline as a function of the amyloid plaque accumulation in the two structures. There are two specific aims of the project: (1) an ETHOBEHAVIORAL ANALYSIS will investigate the scope of amyloid plaque effects on the animal’s ability to discern safety-danger boundary and make optimal risky foraging decisions; and (2) a SYSTEMS-LEVEL ANALYSIS will determine the neural synchrony in the PL-HPC network as AD mice perform risky foraging and also probe whether decision-making deficits can be alleviated by optogenetic intervention. Information generated from this project would be of significance (1) from a basic scientific perspective because it will provide novel data pertaining to AD-associated changes neural coding and decision-making; and (2) from an applied perspective because it provides a new avenue of naturalistic-based preclinical research that can potentially lead to developing successful treatments of AD-related declines in cognitive functions.

Hormonal modulation of sensory plasticity related to reproductive cycles is widespread among vertebrates, but the underlying molecular and genetic mechanisms responsible for these steroid-dependent changes remain poorly understood. This project takes an integrated molecular, anatomical, and physiological approach to determine the effects of gonadal steroids on the adaptive auditory plasticity for encoding socially relevant acoustic signals. The proposed research focuses on the plainfin midshipman fish, a species for which acoustic communication is vital for reproductive success. During the breeding season the female midshipman's auditory system is "re-tuned" to detect and encode the dominant components of the male's advertisement call. This seasonal shift is thought to improve mate detection and localization in the acoustic environment where these fish spawn. Increased auditory sensitivity in midshipman fish is mediated by estrogen and is correlated with increased sensory receptor density in the primary auditory organ. The objective of this study is to determine how estrogen regulates cellular and molecular changes in the inner ear of the female plainfin midshipman, leading to seasonal, steroid-dependent changes in hearing that enhance intraspecific acoustic communication to facilitate reproduction. The central hypothesis is that estrogen upregulates inner ear gene networks for cell proliferation, hair cell differentiation, and cell survival, leading to increased hair cell addition and enhanced auditory sensitivity in reproductive female midshipman. The collaborative research team combines cell and molecular biology expertise on hair cell death and protection with electrophysiological expertise in the midshipman auditory system, and cellular mechanisms of auditory hair cell regeneration, uniquely positioning us to perform integrated research spanning molecules to function. There are three Specific Aims: 1) Determine the estrogen dependent-effects on cell proliferation in the saccule and the relative contribution of Wnt signaling, 2) Assess the role of estrogen on saccular hair cell fate determination and the contribution of Notch signaling, and 3) Determine estrogen-dependent effects on cell survival in the saccule and the contribution of heat shock proteins. These experiments will use both in vitro and in vivo approaches to manipulate cellular signaling in female midshipman from different reproductive states, allowing for precise assessment of the specific contributions of each signaling pathway to estrogen-mediated auditory plasticity. This integrated, multidisciplinary approach to the study of neuroendocrine modulation of sensory function, linking molecular and genetic changes with physiological plasticity that drives socially relevant behavior, is thus innovative and will significantly enhance understanding of adaptive hormonally-driven plasticity that influences reproductive behavior.

In 2017, UNAIDS estimated that 23% of diagnosed persons living with HIV (PLWH) were not accessing antiretroviral therapy (ART), and 18% of PLWH taking ART had unsuppressed viral loads. The development of sustained-release or long-acting injectable antiretroviral therapy (LAI ART) is an important technological advance that could increase ART uptake and adherence by providing new options to support viral load suppression. Research is urgently needed to understand factors that will drive end-user acceptability, so that developers can iteratively formulate more desirable products and funders can identify and prioritize the products most likely to have high uptake and sustained use. This proposal has the following aims: (1) To design and pilot test a discrete choice experiment (DCE) to identify product and delivery attributes related to LAI ART acceptability among patients in the United States (US), based on our prior work and key informant interviews; (2) To recruit 200 ART naïve-individuals and 500 ART-experienced individuals in Seattle and Atlanta for a DCE to estimate LAI ART product preferences and identify patient characteristics associated with acceptability among these two key potential end-user groups; and (3) To design and pilot test a similar DCE instrument for use in Kenya, then recruit 200 ART naïve-individuals and 500 ART-experienced individuals in Nairobi to learn about patient preferences in the region most impacted by the HIV epidemic. Innovations in the proposed research include a focus on novel LAI ART products in development, inclusion of two patient perspectives (i.e., those just starting treatment and those considering a switch), and exploration of how individual characteristics including prior ART adherence and treatment outcomes influence patient preferences. Our multidisciplinary team includes clinical researchers, behavioral scientists, and health economists with expertise in DCE design and modeling from the University of Washington (UW), RTI International, and Emory University in the US, and from Kenyatta National Hospital in Kenya. The proposed work will take place at two AIDS Clinical Trials Group clinical research sites in the US (i.e., the UW AIDS Clinical Trials Unit in Seattle and the Ponce de Leon Center in Atlanta), and at two HIV clinics within Kenyatta National Hospital in Nairobi, which has been a site for collaborative research with the UW’s Kenya Research and Training Program for over 25 years. Supported by preliminary studies conducted as part of an ongoing UM1 project to develop LAI ART (AI120176, Ho/Collier, NIAID Targeted Long-Acting Combination Antiretroviral Therapy), the proposed work will advance LAI ART product development efforts by providing key estimates of acceptability and patient preferences, enabling funders, product developers, and policy makers to optimize products for the greatest likelihood of uptake, adherence, and long-term viral suppression.

This project proposes to characterize the properties of long-range connections between human brain regions, using MRI data from the Human Connectome Project. Using novel data science tools that we will develop we will assemble a benchmark of the distribution of tissue properties in major brain connections, apply novel statistical methods that connect the properties of brain connections to cognitive abilities, and create visualization tools for further communication and exploration of this dataset and other similar datasets.

This proposal builds on the PI's previously funded work (NSF CAREER Award: DRL-0845110; NSF REAL: DRL-1420351) showing that women are discouraged from computer science courses because stereotypes cause them to believe that computer science is not one of their academic interests. In the current proposal, we investigate whether a mindset that does not seem gendered on its surface - the cultural belief that academic interest is fixed - contributes to gender gaps in computer science participation. We further examine whether changing educational environments to foster a growth mindset about interest - a belief that academic interest is malleable - and pairing it with information about a welcoming local computer science culture reduces gender gaps in computer science. This research is extremely applicable to educational policies and practices. The research we propose suggests that women may be forsaking important learning opportunities before trying them because of a fixed mindset about academic interest in combination with perceptions of an unwelcoming culture in computer science. However, relatively simple changes to educational environments such as showcasing peers' stories and changing the structure of advising meetings can prevent many women from eliminating computer science as an option. Like classic growth mindset research, this research is well-suited to education and dissemination.

Sexual harassment is widespread, and has deleterious effects on its targets, including disengagement and withdrawal from work and school, decreased performance, anxiety, depression, and physical symptoms that adversely affect health. Despite it prevalence, sexual harassment is notoriously under-reported by both its targets and others in society. This proposal describes four sets of experiments that draw upon theoretical perspectives on prototypes to explore how a narrow prototype of women (as White, straight, traditionally feminine) prevents the recognition of sexual harassment when it targets women who do not fit the prototype, such as those who are not traditionally feminine on characteristics and attributes and those who possess intersectional identities that overlap less fully with the prototype of women (e.g., Black women). The A-Series studies investigate whether sexual harassment targets are viewed as overlapping with the prototype of women, such as feminine, White, and straight. The B-series studies explore how the prototype of women hinders perceiving sexual harassment when it targets women who do not fit with the prototype. The C-Series studies extend this reasoning to self-perceptions and explore how women's own prototypicality shapes their perceptions of sexual harassment when they are the targets of this behavior. The D-Series studies experimentally broaden the representation of women who experience sexual harassment to test whether this increases perceptions of sexual harassment targeting nonprototypical women and alters the prototype of women so it is more inclusive. Perceptions of sexual harassment are critical; these perceptions serve as the catalyst to remedying sexual harassment and realizing the protections offered by federal civil rights laws. It is thus important to understand the barriers that prevent both targets and observers from perceiving sexual harassment. This research will be of interest to scholars and practitioners who address civil rights law, as well as to organizations seeking to address sexual harassment. #Metoo is likely to put pressure on organizations to get sexual harassment training right, and evidence concerning best practices will be important in the development of more effective approaches to sexual harassment. This can in turn improve workforce diversity and mitigate the deleterious effects of sexual harassment on its targets.

This proposal will test a novel, computationally-motivated hypothesis about neural dysfunction in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). ASD is a heterogeneous neurodevelopmental disorder of unknown etiology. However, a unifying theme of numerous proposals is that there is a pervasive disruption of neural excitatory/inhibitory (E/I) balance. A major limitation of the E/I hypothesis is that it describes a property of individual neurons; how that property scales up to neural circuits and how it relates to behavior – the level at which ASD is described – is not well specified. Neural computational models offer a way to bridge the divide between single-unit properties and behavior, and bring the necessary specificity to test possible changes in E/I in ASD. One well-established neural computation that directly relates to E/I is “divisive normalization”, a computational framework that characterizes neural responses as the ratio of net excitatory relative to net suppressive input. Here we aim to test the hypothesis that ASD involves disrupted divisive normalization using vision as a model system. We will test two possible mechanisms of weakened divisive normalization. The first is the traditionally posited disruption of local, within-area circuits that mediate suppressive drive. The second is a novel hypothesis based on recent empirical findings in our lab. We have shown enhanced suppressive feedback of responses from higher stages to lower stages of visual processing in individuals with ASD. We suggest this enhanced suppressive feedback reduces responses of neurons that would otherwise participate in divisive normalization. This hypothesis makes specific predictions about the conditions under which disrupted divisive normalization will be observed in ASD. We will test these predictions using a combination of functional MRI, ERP, and diffusion MRI.

Young children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) face a unique set of challenges in several key areas of development: their ability to interact socially with others, to communicate their needs and desires effectively, and to respond flexibly to events and changes in their environment. Research has indicated that these challenges are best addressed by providing ASD-specialized interventions, and by starting these interventions within the first 3 years of life. Several different interventions have led to improvements in social, communication, and behavioral functioning, and have accumulated enough research evidence to support their use with young children with ASD. In addition, some of these interventions have been found to reduce parents’ stress and to increase their feelings of competence as a parent, perhaps by improving their child’s social responsiveness. Most of these evidence-based interventions have been implemented successfully by clinicians or by parents, but have not yet been adapted for use community-based early intervention (EI) programs, where they may reach a broader segment of the population. The purpose of this project is to identify whether a specific ASD-focused intervention, Reciprocal Imitation Training (RIT), can be used by community-based EI providers to improve ASD symptoms in children and to improve stress levels in their parents. RIT is a short-term, focused intervention that teaches the spontaneous imitation of object use and gestures to children with ASD during ongoing play interactions. In addition to improving imitation skills, RIT has also led to improvements in children’s play, language, and social attention. This project will provide training in RIT to community providers working in publicly funded (IDEA Part C) EI programs serving children from birth to 3 years. These programs are available in every state, at no cost to families, and often serve as the first line of treatment for children with ASD. RIT is ideally suited for EI settings because it is inexpensive, play-based, easy to learn and implement, and can be taught to parents (as well as siblings). This project aligns with three goals listed in the FY18 ARP Clinical Trial Award Areas of Interest: (1) Behavioral, cognitive, and other non-pharmacological therapies; (2) Dissemination/implementation of clinically validated interventions; and (3) Healthcare provider-focused training or tools to improve healthcare delivery for individuals with ASD. We have learned from our preliminary studies and current work that most EI providers have children with ASD in their caseloads, yet they are not satisfied with the interventions they are using, and many do not feel comfortable identifying treatment goals, providing intervention to children, or coaching parents of children with ASD. We also know that they report enjoying the RIT training activities and indicate that the training leads to increased comfort and skills in working with the families they serve. The proposed study will help us identify the extent to which RIT impacts important family and child outcomes, as well as whether certain characteristics of children or families, or aspects in the way RIT is used by providers, may impact its effectiveness. This information will lead to a more refined approach to training EI providers in RIT as well as tailoring the intervention to better match the needs of different families. This project has the potential to enable more children with ASD to receive evidence-based, specialized intervention during the birth-to-three years, when it is likely to have the greatest impact. We expect that the receipt of early, ASD-specialized intervention will improve children’s social communication and ability to interact with their families as well as other children, and that these improvements will have positive effects over the long term. We also expect that caregivers who use RIT will experience increased confidence in their ability to parent their child, as well as decreased parenting stress, as their ability to engage and interact with their child improves. In addition, we believe that EI providers will feel more confident and capable in working with children with ASD and their parents. Importantly, if RIT is found to be effective for use by EI providers, we have the potential to disseminate this intervention within the existing infrastructure of the EI system. In this way, RIT could have a major impact on the treatment and course of ASD, as it would give toddlers and families an early start in receiving ASD-specialized treatment through the Part C EI system that is available to all families across the U.S.

Racial minority groups have been Othered in U.S. society, but not in uniform ways. This proposal draws on our model of racial stereotyping (Zou & Cheryan, 2017)—integrating a dimension of cultural foreignness along with the more commonly studied dimension of perceived inferiority—to suggest that different racial and ethnic groups face qualitatively different experiences of discrimination. Using a combination of large-scale audit studies and controlled laboratory experiments, we investigate 1) whether racial and ethnic minority groups face different forms of discrimination, 2) the implications of these different forms of discrimination for the likelihood of reporting it, and 3) the strategies that are required to ameliorate discrimination based on which racial and ethnic group is targeted. Systematically integrating two dimensions of perceived inferiority and cultural foreignness gives us insight into forms of discrimination faced by groups less frequently studied in social psychology, such as Latinos, Asian Americans, and Arab Americans. Knowledge about how perceived cultural foreignness and inferiority contribute to discrimination is important so that these forms of discrimination can be recognized, attended to, and eventually eliminated. For instance, knowledge of which groups are most susceptible and when could be used to inform policies and strategies that bring racial and ethnic minority groups together to fight against discrimination. This work would further demonstrate that laws, policies, and community and individual efforts to reduce racial discrimination may benefit from paying attention to discrimination based on perceived cultural foreignness because perceivers and targets may be particularly unaware or less likely to report these forms of discrimination when they occur. In recent decades, the U.S. has seen unprecedented growth in its Latino and Asian American populations (Colby & Ortman, 2014). The rising population of Arab Americans has also drawn much political attention (Asi & Beaulieu, 2013). Such contemporary demographic changes, along with the longtime presence of many racial and ethnic groups in the U.S., underscore the importance of incorporating multiple groups into our research and studying the distinct ways in which they are perceived and treated.

This project will describe individual differences in impulsive responses to negative emotions in the real-world. We will test what situational factors and emotion regulation skills make some people more or less impulsive in the face of negative emotions, and how the interplay between negative emotions and impulsive behaviors could lead to alcohol and marijuana misuse in the real world. This project will be able to elucidate when, how and for whom impulsive responses to emotion leads to alcohol and marijuana misuse.

With support from a National Science Foundation Major Research Instrumentation Award, the University of Washington (UW) acquires a state-of-the-art 3 Tesla (3T) scanner for structural and functional brain imaging research. This shared instrument is a primary tool for advancing scientific research and training on topics including language, visual neuroscience, social psychology, autism, child development, cognition, brain-computer interfaces and neurological disorders.

Eighty percent of the world’s population lives in low and middle income countries (LMIC) with few mental health resources, resulting in a substantial mental health treatment gap. Growing evidence indicates that evidence- based mental health treatments can be delivered in LMIC using a task-sharing approach, in which non- professionals deliver care under supervision. Very limited research, however, focuses on how to embed, support, and effectively deliver these treatments within existing, government-supported systems in which they could be scaled up to population-level. With LMIC governments typically spending <2% of their national budget on mental health, innovative and low-cost options are needed for intervention delivery and for implementation support. Building and Sustaining Interventions for Children (BASIC): Task-sharing mental health care in low-resource settings builds on our 15-year history of collaborations with research partners in Kenya, prior NIH-funded work that identified mental health needs of orphaned children in LMIC, and iterative and collaborative intervention adaptation and testing using a task-sharing approach, to address these needs. In BASIC, we test the implementation of Trauma-focused Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (TF-CBT), delivered via task-sharing, in two governmental sectors prioritized by our Kenyan partners as potential options for scale up— Education and Health Extension. The recent devolvement of the Kenyan government (leading to more local decision-making), the launch of a National Mental Health Policy, and our Kenyan partners’ empowerment work building enthusiasm for TF-CBT are converging to create a local climate in which BASIC could become part of the county plan, if evidence-based guidance for implementation, using mostly existing resources, existed. We test mental health treatment delivery in Education (via teacher delivery) and Health Extension (via community health volunteers) with the goal of identifying implementation practices and policies (IPPs) that explain implementation outcomes. This stepped wedge cluster randomized trial includes 40 schools and the 40 surrounding villages (120 lay counselors in each) who provide TF-CBT to 1,280 youth. We use a novel method, qualitative comparative analyses (QCA), that holds potential for substantially advancing the field of implementation science. QCA leverages the rigor of quantitative approaches and the detail of qualitative approaches, and allows for complex causality and equifinality (i.e., an outcome can be reached by multiple means). Study aims are: 1) Identify actionable IPPs that predict adoption (delivery) and fidelity (high- quality delivery) after 10 sites in sector implement TF-CBT. Use identified IPPs to (Aim 1a) guide implementation planning support for subsequent sites and to (Aim 1b) generate testable hypotheses about IPPs as causal mechanisms; 2) Test mechanisms of implementation success in both sectors; and 3) Test TF-CBT effectiveness (i.e., mental health outcomes; functioning) and cost in both sectors. This research has important implications for implementing an EBT in low-resource settings, including the US.

Early blind individuals show superior performance across a wide variety of auditory skills. However, fMRI studies examining neural plasticity resulting from blindness have almost exclusively focused on techniques that pool information across voxels. As a result, while studies have shown that differences in neural activity between early blind and sighted subjects are correlated with behavioral performance, justifications for these correlations remain at the ‘more cortex is better’ or the ‘bigger BOLD (or sometimes smaller) responses are better’ level of explanation. We will examine the widespread alterations that occur within auditory processing pathways within early blind individuals using ‘voxel‐wise encoding’ models that represent each voxel as having a tuning function along dimension(s) of interest. Simple linking models will allow us to predict behavioral performance based on the predicted cortical discriminability of stimuli. This will allow us, for the first time, to model quantitatively how neural responses to auditory stimuli might mediate the enhanced behavioral abilities observed in early blind individuals. In Aim 1 we will examine whether early blindness alters primary auditory cortex (PAC). We will begin by comparing PAC size, responsiveness and frequency tuning bandwidths across early blind and sighted individuals. We will then examine whether tuning for temporal amplitude modulations within primary auditory cortex are also affected by blindness. Computational models will be used to link primary auditory cortex neural responses to behavioral performance across a variety of auditory tasks for blind and sighted individuals. In Aim 2 we will use naturalistic stimuli to measure complex auditory spectro‐temporal tuning in both auditory and occipital cortex. Again, computational models will be used to link each individual’s neural responses to auditory performance on complex naturalistic tasks. Finally in Aim 3 we will examine auditory motion processing. Although auditory motion responses are found within visual cortical area hMT+ in early blind individuals, it is not clear how these responses help early blind subjects to perceptually segregate moving auditory objects in complex auditory environments. We will examine whether hMT+ is tuned for frequency as well as direction of motion and how hMT+ neural responses might result in enhanced behavioral performance on auditory motion tasks.

The Summer Institute in Neuroimaging and Data Science provides training in modern data science tools and methods, such as programming, data management, machine learning and data visualization. Through lectures, hands-on training sessions and team projects, it will empower scientists from a variety of backgrounds in the use of these tools in research on the human brain and on neurological and psychiatric brain disorders.

The BRAINS (Broadening the Representation of Academic Investigators in NeuroScience) Program, established in 2011, explicitly addresses the inclusion, retention, and advancement of early career (post Ph.D. to pre-tenure) neuroscientists from historically underrepresented and marginalized groups (URMGs: individuals from marginalized racial and ethnic identities and persons with disabilities). BRAINS has pioneered a unique cohort-based professional development approach that positively impacts participants’ career trajectories, especially in academic neuroscience, by building a community of neuroscience peers, enabling mentoring networks, activating participants’ cultural capital, and increasing participants’ career self-efficacy. The success of BRAINS is evident by our findings that 90% of the 144 participants continue to remain in neuroscience careers. Moreover, 50% are currently in tenure track positions, compared to 24% at time of joining BRAINS. With this renewal project, Aim 1 builds on the successes of BRAINS by expanding our program through an increase in the number of the BRAINS community participants, as well as deepening the engagement of all participants with core BRAINS skills and concepts. When compared to other national professional development programs, the BRAINS program stands out in terms of the extent to which BRAINS participants continue to engage deeply with the community long after their first year in the program. In its first decade, evaluation data show that BRAINS programming is a consistent transformational and foundational resource for its participants. Thus, the BRAINS program is uniquely positioned to explore and identify the essential factors that increase retention of neuroscientists from URMGs in academic and nonacademic science careers. Therefore, in Aim 2, we will introduce a new 10-year evaluation instrument to help us to better understand why the program is impactful and what sticks with participants as they progress through their careers. In summary, these Aims will allow BRAINS to expand in terms of participant numbers and in terms of continuing to empower over 200 neuroscientists from URMGs to thrive and advance in their careers. Further, this work will shed new light on the important factors that can improve the long term retention of neuroscientists from URMGs in science careers, which in turn can inform the development of future programs and institutional policies aimed at increasing the retention of URM scientists in biomedical careers.