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bioRxiv2024

Science Education for the Youth (SEFTY): A Neuroscience Outreach Program for High School Students in Southern Nevada During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Laboratory outreach programs for K-12 students in the United States from 2020-2022 were suspended or delayed due to COVID-19 restrictions. While Southern Nevada also observed similar closures for onsite programs, we and others hypothesized that in-person laboratory activities could be prioritized after increasing vaccine doses were available to the public and masking was encouraged. Here, we describe how the Laboratory of Neurogenetics and Precision Medicine at the University of Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV) collaborated with administrators from a local school district to conduct training activities for high school students during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Science Education for the Youth (SEFTY) programs curriculum was constructed to incorporate experiential learning, fostering collaboration and peer-to-peer knowledge exchange. Leveraging neuroscience tools from our UNLV laboratory, we engaged with 117 high school applicants from 2021-2022. Our recruitment efforts yielded a diverse cohort, with >41% Pacific Islander and Asian students, >9% African American students, and >12% multiracial students. We assessed the impact of the SEFTY program through pre- and post-assessment student evaluations, revealing a significant improvement of 20.3% in science proficiency (p<0.001) after participating in the program. Collectively, our laboratory curriculum offers valuable insights into the capacity of an outreach program to actively foster diversity and cultivate opportunities for academic excellence, even in the challenging context of a global pandemic. Significance StatementThe Science Education for the Youth (SEFTY) program at UNLV successfully engaged 117 diverse high school students in neuroscience-based experiential learning, demonstrating the viability of in-person education during a pandemic. Significant improvements in science proficiency (20.3% increase) underscore the programs effectiveness in fostering academic excellence and diversity. This initiative potentially serves as a model for maintaining high-quality, inclusive science education in challenging times.

scientific communication and education↗

bioRxiv2017

Dissociable signatures of visual salience and behavioral relevance across attentional priority maps in human cortex

Computational models posit that visual attention is guided by activity within spatial maps that index the image-computable salience and the behavioral relevance of objects in the scene. However, the simultaneous influence of these factors on putative neural attentional priority maps in human cortex is not well understood. We tested the hypothesis that visual salience and behavioral relevance independently impact the activation profile across retinotopically-organized cortical regions by quantifying attentional priority maps measured in human brains using functional MRI while participants attended one of two differentially-salient stimuli. We find that the topography of activation in priority maps, as reflected in the modulation of region-level patterns of population activity, independently indexed the physical salience and behavioral relevance of each scene element. Moreover, salience strongly impacted activation patterns in early visual areas, whereas later visual areas were dominated by relevance. This suggests that prioritizing spatial locations relies on distributed neural codes containing graded representations of salience and relevance across the visual hierarchy.\n\nSignificance StatementOften, it is necessary to orient towards bright, unique, or sudden events in the environment - that is, salient stimuli. However, we can focus processing resources on less salient visual information if it is relevant to the task at hand. We tested a theory which supposes that we represent different scene elements according to both their salience and their relevance in a series of priority maps by measuring fMRI activation patterns across the human brain and reconstructing spatial maps of the visual scene under different task conditions. We found that different regions indexed either the salience or the relevance of scene items, but not their interaction, suggesting an evolving representation of salience and relevance across different visual areas.

neuroscience↗