By Gina Mantica
10:00 a.m. on August 13, 2020 CDT – Updated at 1:33 p.m. August 13, 2020 CDT
At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, North Texas researcher Candice Mills had to temporarily adapt and move her mental reports online, allowing her to recruit more varied participants.
Chandramallika Basak, a cognitive neuroscientist, had to teach participants in her brain education study how to use Microsoft Teams to connect with researchers, circles of family and friends. And archaeologist Naomi Cleghorn has honed her knowledge research skills to read about her 3D excavation site in South Africa.
They are among the many scientists here and across the country who have had to rotate because university studies have stopped because of the pandemic. Many universities allowed only the essentials in laboratories and stopped clinical trials face-to-face. In North Texas, some study labs are now open with limited capacity.
For those 3 students in the Dallas area, the rooms and open spaces have offices and summer labs. Mills, Basak and Cleghorn have creatively designed new analyses and systems to advance their studies using home technology.
Prior to the pandemic, Basak’s Neuroscience and Cognition Laboratory at the UUT-Dallas Center for Vital Longevity read the effectiveness of a brain education video game.
The purpose of the video game is for healthy older people to flex their intellectual “muscles” that naturally begin to decline as other people age, said Evan Smith, a graduate student in the lab.
Once participants have played the game, researchers use psychology software to check the visual reminiscence of participants: the amount of visual data that can be stored in the brain at the same time to perform existing tasks.
During the test, researchers compare participants’ reminiscence measures, such as the accuracy and speed at which they respond to photos that appear on a screen.
Researchers are also using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to determine whether gambling causes adjustments in the design or activity of participants’ brains.
In March, the team had to avoid brain scans. Without the scans, Basak examines whether the game adjusts the brain over time. “We ask for an extension [of our funding] because we can’t use all the data from our brain imaging,” Basak said.
But you can still examine how the game affects the reminiscence of the participants. The team delivered tablets loaded with video game tests and psychology software to participants’ homes.
Participants can share their screens with researchers through Microsoft Teams while using the software. Researchers can then record a participant’s reminiscence while watching.
Basak also took advantage of this time to inspire social estrangement. “I took advantage of this [stop] to exercise our participants in a new [Microsoft Teams] tool,” Basak said. “We inspire the seniors in our organization to use more online equipment to securely connect only to us, but also to others, like their friends and family.”
Like Basak, Mills took advantage of the credit of the generation to advance their research. Mills, a ut-Dallas psychologist, studies how young people report and think critically. Your child’s Christmas wish for a beloved mini-Tesla encouraged one of his existing projects.
Mills and his team ask other young men about Santa Claus to find out how young people replace their ideals. Investigators send interview questions to parents a few days before the assembly so parents can review them. The researchers then talk about their ideals and report with Zoom’s youth.
This assignment began in a practical and simple way for Mills and his team to continue when the labs closed.
But other studies, such as the one that examines the effectiveness of guided play to train clinical concepts of preschoolers such as camouflage, are harder to make the transition online. Researchers give the young lizard figures to move on a rug with an outdoor level and place a “flying” toy eagle nearby.
When a child moves the figure to a position where it is not with the mat, the toy eagle makes a sound and researchers let the child know that the eagle can see the lizard. Researchers later tried to see how much young people learned about the concept of camouflage. “We’re exploring tactics to do a laughing activity between the experimenter and the child imaginable online,” Mills said.
Meanwhile, Mills strives to increase the number and diversity of participants in his virtual studies. Mills collaborated with child progression scholars at universities across the country to create Children Helping Science, an online platform where families can view active study projects that they can apply for as home participants.
“We can succeed in young people with zip codes that might not be to get to college,” Mills said.
Studies also give young people something to do when they’re 40. “Studies are designed to use laughing activities to capture anything about how young people think about the world,” Mills said. “We need those studies to be nice.”
Cleghorn also turned to the generation of his time at home and honed his knowledge analysis skills.
Cleghorn has been visiting the South African coast every summer since 2011. As an archaeologist, you need to perceive the origins of human behavior.
She and a team of UWU-Arlington academics investigated the behavior of others who lived between 18,000 and 50,000 years ago. Its excavation site is a cave overlooking the southern Indian Ocean. The point of the sea would have decreased 50,000 years ago, and from an ocean, the site would have faced an open plain.
Cleghorn needs to perceive how other people would have used the resources of this plain. But because the plain is now under the choppy coastal waters, the cave in which researchers paint can provide clues.
Before the pandemic, the team worked every summer to extract fabrics from the cave. When the team digs up an object, a special laser records its location. The object is then securely placed in a bag with a barcode that allows researchers to attach the object to the bag to its location. In the lab, researchers leave the object blank.
Since the team cannot travel to South Africa this summer, Cleghorn is honing its analytical skills. It works to link known items to their location at the excavation site. This way, you can see where all the elements are in a 3-D space.
“Archaeology is a spatial process indeed,” Cleghorn said. “We can link all those parts in combination [in 3-D] to answer questions like, where are all the shell fragments concentrated?”
Then the team can view the knowledge in 3-d to be more informed about the field. Examining elements in 3-d can help researchers know what happened at the site at other times over time, “for example, if the accumulation of a layer is similar to human activity or simply to the sedimentation of herbs,” he said.
To date, the Cleghorn team has tracked approximately 89,000 items from the excavation site.
The pandemic presents many demanding situations for researchers accustomed to running in person. Although this summer was not what anyone expected, these 3 researchers turned their demanding situations into opportunities: for education, connection and advancement. Albert Einstein just as he said, “In the midst of difficulty is opportunity.”
Gina Mantica reports on science for The Dallas Morning News as a scholarship to the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Gina Mantica. Gina graduated in biology from Tufts University and reports on science for The Dallas Morning News on a scholarship from the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
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