NEUROEXED
Our Team's Projects and Collaborative Work
Our collaborative projects inspire further expansion of our field and define new boundaries of our craft. Core values are what makes a team differentiable. Here are some of ours.
Cognitive-Emotional Integration - Neocortical Re-Rrepresentation of Limbic Function
Nothing gets planned or decided without cognition - the symbolic representation of the neocortex, our crowning neuro-evolutionary accomplishment as a species. But we also know that direct experiences, like internships, undergraduate research, study abroad, community service, provide a powerful emotional or gut-level complement to a college student’s cognitive planning. That cognitive-emotional integration is represented in the cortex as a "value network" of brain areas. Recently, we have posted servaral long blogs on how the cortex manages this symbolic representation and where in the frontal cortex that limbic re-representation might occur to support the value network. Now is the time to focus on what happens in individual neocortical areas without losing sight of the brain networks that connect them.
Cluster Members
Brandy Eggan
Kassie von Stein
Vanessa NyBlom
Jenay Bartlett
Onoseta Momodu
Rachel Orenstein
Cognitive-Emotional Integration - clinical insight
We are not clinical psychologists, but if one is interested in cognitive-emotional integration (and we are) it is necessary to look at this phenomenon in clinical situations. That is what this group does. In a recent series of blogs, we wrote about "clinical insight" where executive (cortical) function was able to override anxiety such as in a case of PTSD, perhaps through a connecting brain pathway. Now, we are working on other illustrative syndromes where we feel we can see this cognitive-emotional integration happening in the brain and continue to look for insights in to non-clinical situations like college students deciding between majors/career paths.
Cluster Members
Natalia Baron
Sophia DiLavore
Rachel Dolowich
Kathleen Larsen
Mecca Brooks
Engaged Education from ExEd lessons
How can teaching in introductory psychology be conducted in a way that promotes active student learning and engagement? We use a concept-based teaching approach with open-book essay tests. In a Tuesday/Thursday hybrid teaching format, concepts are first introduced by each week by a short video and a brief on-line quiz on Monday before the Tuesday in-person lecture/discussion where detailed facts and theories are presented. Then, on Thursday we use a Zoom meeting format that starts with a brief review and then features discussion in Zoom groups with report-out to the whole class. The idea is to practice there some active discussion and active learning. Like others, we have been impacted by Artificial Intelligence (AI). So we are experimenting with having the Monday quizzes be answered in oral conversation with an Ai-driven avatars (in collaboration with InStage Inc. (with whom we have written papers). We are also encouraging Zoom groups on Thursday to use ChatGpt to develop their answers to questions that are then evaluated by those Zoon groups in their class discussion. Finally, we feature short in-class videos of mindfulness and growth mindset. The overall goal is to emulate the engagement of experiential education based on the neuroscience of cognitive-emotional integration.
Cluster Members
Arun Venkitanarayanan
Madeline Martin
Georgina Breihof
Agata (Buras) Greco
Experiential Development of Professional Wisdom
Relevant direct experiences, like internships, can compliment a student's a major, and can contribute to the development of maturity, insight, and even the beginning of professional wisdom in that student. To get a better handle on what college students think is wisdom, we did a survey that is in a blog. Brandy and Jim, with help from Rachel and Vanessa are writing a book that we hope to submit to a publisher in the Fall of 2024. Then this group might change or collapse into other groups. Books are the ultimate output of many blogs and that was what happened in the two books listed on our main lab web page.
Cluster Members
Brandy Eggan
Nina Pluviose
Noor Ahmed
Brandon Ascencio
Rachel Orenstein
Vanessa NyBlom
Sympathetic Intelligence, Social Media, Diversity
Sympathetic Intelligence is a group that is working with an emerging Center for Sympathetic Intelligence (see our affiliation lab web page). That center focuses on interactions between people, the establishment of connection, and the development of collective caring. In this context diversity, social media, the structure of organizations are studied with regard to cognition. An emerging area is trauma and resiliance led by some members here and several blog writers outside the lab (yes there are many)
Cluster Members
Andrew Keating
Zuri Steadman
Pat Gareau
Natalie Seow
Brandy Eggan
Lab Outreach Through Podcasting
The lab not only produces blogs as a general way to develop ideas for later larger works (e.g. chapters and books), but it produces podcasts with thought-leaders in the field of cooperative education or work-integrated education and entities and agencies that promote this work. This work complements the blogs and is featured on our home page and under the ExperienED tab on the lab web page. Adrienne is the longest continuous member of the lab having written our first student blog in 2009, helped edit Stellars 2017 book. She works with Mary Churchill on the podcast who is now interm Dean of the Wheelock College of Education.
Cluster Members
Adrienne Dooley
Dr. James Stellar
Our lab group's core values
The Experiential Development of Professional Wisdom
Student development of "so-called" soft-skills, professional knowledge, entrepreneurship, and even wisdom through experiential education is seen as a natural progression with age and with experiential activities. This project examines how learning from experience in conjunction with a strong academic curriculum can develop expertise in a skill and thinking area. Knowing the modern view of neuroplasticity, it also looks at factors such as engagement that produce brain and behavioral changes. Knowing modern neuroscience, it looks at cognitive-emotional integration as below.
Cognitive-Emotional Brain Circuit Integration and Reflection
Reflection facilitates the integration of emotion with cognition in producing student maturity from experiential education. While focused on the neuroscience of brain areas and networks from brain scanner studies, this project also learns from other fields such as art/music, social psychology/sociology, philosophy, etc. A particular interest is in the two-way communication between unconscious (mammalian brain) and conscious (primate brain) decision-making brain circuits and its enhancement over time. We also are interested in parallels to mindfulness and growth mindset practices.
Diversity and inclusion
Using experiential education thinking to promote students taking agency in working with diverse groups of college students for a diverse world is the focus of this project. Several members of the lab recently produced a book on this topic, using student and alumni stories to illustrate basic social neuroscience principles of relevant unconscious decision-making. There is no question that diversity/inclusion generally is a compelling issue of our time inside and outside of the college experience and is an ongoing interest of the lab.
Engaged Teaching
Applying lessons from experiential education and the above projects, the goal here is to better reach, engage, and promote active learning in all classroom students, ranging from those who are passionate about the topic to those who may lack confidence or are otherwise less engaged. We are currently using a balanced hybrid, flipped-classroom teaching model with group work and continuous student feedback in an introductory psychology class that the lab director teaches every semester and which has research assistance from lab members.
The Triune Brain
Select a layer of the brain to explore further
Neomammilian Layer
The crowning achievement of evolution is the development of the 6 layer neocortex that houses our ability to perceive, act, and reason with a high degree of cognitive abstraction. Sitting at the highest level of brain function, it exercises the power of speech and handles the facts and theory learning seen in higher education. Research also indicates that it tends to perceive itself as the source of all awareness often ignoring the functioning of lower brain systems that our defining quote from Pascale calls “heart reasons.”