REU Site in the Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences

ABSTRACT

Proposal #0649249

PI: Dr. Jay Coleman

Title of Project: Summer Research Institute in Experimental Psychology

The Summer Research Institute in Experimental Psychology REU at the University of South Carolina permits 10 undergraduate students to conduct research with internationally recognized scientific scholars in the subfields of behavioral neuroscience, cognition, and cognitive neuroscience for eight weeks. Students are selected from undergraduate institutions nationwide including those with minority-based populations.

The SRIEP focuses minority and non-minority student interest and enthusiasm on the basic science areas of psychology. This provides students an experience in graduate level research including an opportunity to formulate and conduct an experiment with individual guidance from an energetic and supportive research faculty mentor. The student will experience major phases of experimental research including literature generation, data collection, data organization, statistical analysis, and writing a report in the style of the American Psychological Association. A research symposium allows students to present their work at the end of the SRIEP program. Students will learn advanced technology such as drug administration, behavioral testing, immunohistochemistry, confocal microscopy and gene transfer in animals, fMRI/MRI, high density EEG, ERP, and cognitive methods to study attention, deception, development, language, memory and decision making in humans. Student experiences will be enriched by weekly research seminars by faculty with assigned readings, and by weekly sessions on problems in research design and statistics in experimental psychology including discussion of ethics. The University of South Carolina Summer Research Institute in Experimental Psychology provides a forum for educating undergraduate students about the field of experimental psychology. This program emphasis is much needed, as the U.S. is perceived as the leader in fields of experimental psychology, but our universities must be able to motivate and train the best students for future careers in vital areas of behavioral and neural sciences. The Summer Research Institute provides one vehicle to enhance these goals, particularly to educate students who more limited research opportunities at their institution. Program results are documented by follow-up surveys which demonstrate higher numbers of participants entering basic science graduate programs than cohorts of non-participant program applicants.