Research by IFFM grantees and Atlas Network affiliates promotes free-market principles. World Data Lab aims to support these researchers with a suite of services designed to help them collect, analyze, and present data in a way that reinforces the messaging of their findings.
The Jubilee Centre will conduct a landscape review with recommendations to help guide and accelerate the dissemination of findings from forgiveness science to mental health professionals, educators, and faith leaders.
Broadly considered, morphogenesis is the ability of groups of cells to build complex, functional anatomical structures. A multiscale agent-based model of morphogenesis that quantitatively examined the impact of stress sharing (where stress is a physiological parameter reflecting error in a homeostatic loop) on the ability to reach target morphology was constructed and analyzed. The research found stress sharing improves the morphogenetic efficiency of multicellular collectives; populations with stress sharing reached anatomical targets faster. Moreover, stress sharing influenced the future fate of distant cells in the multi-cellular collective, enhancing cells’ movement and their radius of influence, consistent with the hypothesis that stress sharing works to increase cohesiveness of collectives. These analyses support an important role for stress sharing in natural and engineered systems that seek robust large-scale behaviors to emerge from the activity of their competent components.
This trial aims to test the effects of an app-based Christian and Islamic meditation, compared to secular mindfulness and a waitlist, using a randomised controlled trial. If the results yield positive outcomes, this study will support the efficacy of these contemplations, offering practitioners a way to enhance their well-being within their religious framework.
A long-standing objective in the study of consciousness is to characterize the neural signatures of perceived compared with unperceived sensory stimuli. In particular, the role of different cortical areas in generating consciousness is an active debate. Here the researchers combined electrophysiological and modeling studies to investigate the mechanistic role of individual connections between brain regions in the generation of the activity patterns observed during conscious report. They found that, while frontal areas initiate report-related activity, the parietal cortex acts as a gate to determine whether such activity will propagate back to the visual cortex. This division of labor between prefrontal and parietal cortices is unexplained by current theoretical models of consciousness and will impact mechanistic neural models of conscious report.
Change blindness is a phenomenon characterized by observers’ failure to notice seemingly obvious changes in their visual input. In most cases of change blindness in the literature, such unnoticed changes coincide with other visual transients. This research team studied slow change blindness, a related phenomenon that occurs even in the absence of visual disruptions when the change occurs sufficiently slowly, to determine whether it could be explained by conclusions from classic change blindness. Across three different slow change blindness experiments the team found that observers who consistently failed to notice the change had access to at least two memory representations of the changing display. One representation was precise but short lived: a detailed representation of the more recent stimulus states, but fragile. The other representation lasted longer but was fairly general: stable but too coarse to differentiate the various stages of the change. These findings suggest that, although multiple representations are formed, the failure to compare hypotheses might not explain slow change blindness; even if a comparison were made, the representations would be too sparse (longer term stores) or too fragile (short-lived stores) for such comparison to inform about the change.
Politics and the media in the United States are increasingly nationalized, and this changes how we talk about politics. Instead of reading the local news and discussing local events, people are more often consuming national media and discussing national issues. Unlike local politics, which can rely on shared concrete knowledge about the region, national politics must coordinate large groups of people with little in common. To provide this coordination, this research finds that national-level political discussions rely upon different themes than local-level discussions, using more abstract, moralized, and power-centric language. The higher prevalence of abstract, moralized, and power-centric language in national vs. local politics was found in political speeches, politician Tweets, and Reddit discussions. These national-level linguistic features lead to broader engagement with political messages, but they also foster more anger and negativity. These findings suggest that the nationalization of politics and the media may contribute to rising partisan animosity.
The team first identifies a variety of benefits of doing replication studies. Next, they argue that it is often necessary to improve aspects of the original study, even if that means deviating from the original protocol. Thirdly, they argue that replication studies highlight the importance of and need for more transparency of the research process, but also make clear how difficult that is. Fourthly, they underline that it is worth trying out replication in the humanities. They finish by formulating recommendations regarding reproduction and replication research, aimed specifically at funders, editors and publishers, and universities and other research institutes