As Deater-Deckard explains, “The field of psychological and brain sciences is rapidly making discoveries about how brain development in adolescence and early adulthood is suffering from interactions between neural activity, genes and contexts like poverty and peer influences. Advancing our understanding of how these factors interact in development is critical to improving knowledge about why adolescents make riskier decisions which will enhance their healthy development but that can also increase risk for such problems as dangerous driving, drug abuse and exposure to sexually transmitted diseases.”

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With the continuation of funding for this long-term study, the researchers hope to supply new information to fill key knowledge gaps, he adds. Findings should be helpful to healthcare and public health professionals, educators and related policy groups. Deater-Deckard notes, “Sometimes people observe decisions and sometimes they create decisions which will harm themselves or people . once we are teenagers and young adults, we are more likely to form ‘risky’ decisions. These are often good decisions; sometimes, taking a risk can cause a replacement experience that helps you grow and become wiser.”

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“But sometimes, know more taking a risk can cause experiences that hurt you or others around you. In our scientific research , we try to know how our brains and bodies develop once we are teenagers, for teens living in very different sorts of places. We hope to use this data to assist youth, schools, hospitals and fogeys provide more help to teenagers, in order that they create healthier decisions and make fewer dangerous decisions.”

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Deater-Deckard, who studies child and adolescent cognitive and social-emotional development and therefore the role of parenting and peer environments on developmental outcomes, helps lead the Developmental Science Initiative (DSI) at UMass Amherst. The DSI includes the Healthy Development Initiative at the UMass Center at Springfield, where colleagues and students conduct research and outreach to get and share new knowledge about human development.

 

KATZ, LYZINSKI TO EXPLORE NEURON-LEVEL MECHANISMS OF HOW BRAINS MAKE DECISIONS

Paul Katz, professor of biology and director of neuroscience, and Vincent Lyzinski, a network expert and professor of mathematics and statistics, recently received a three-year, $3.5 million grant from the NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke for a replacement collaboration between researchers at four universities who will explore the neuron-level mechanisms of how the brain makes decisions.

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The project is a component of President Obama’s 2013 Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) initiative at NIH, which seeks to accelerate the event and application of latest technologies resulting in “a revolutionary new dynamic picture of the brain that, for the primary time, shows how individual cells and sophisticated neural circuits interact in both time and space.”

 

Katz says, “It’s a replacement area of exploration; we’re getting to get the entire schematic of the brain of a nudibranch and use that information to work out how behaviors are produced at the resolution of individual neurons. It represents a concerted effort to know how the brain is connected and the way neurons produce behaviors.” The research plan includes stimulating the mollusks with the smell of food and watching their neurons as they respond.