(Photography by Daniel D. Baleckaitis)

Faculty research

Researchers study how the mind multitasks, investigate the interplay between asthma and the common cold, scan the brains of incarcerated psychopaths, and see how sleep helps songbirds learn.

To learn, sleep

When learning two new and competing tasks in the same day, a good night’s sleep helps the brain retain both. In a study published in March in the online Psychological Science, researchers tested starlings’ ability to recognize and repeat two pairs of songs learned in a single day. They found that learning one pair interfered with the birds’ ability to remember the other pair when they were tested before going to sleep. When the starlings were allowed to sleep, their performances improved for both sets of songs, and when they were taught a new song upon awakening, they were still able to remember what they’d learned the day before, despite the new interference. Research has long shown that sleep helps consolidate memory, but this study, by psychology graduate student Timothy Brawn, psychology professor Howard Nusbaum, and biologist Daniel Margoliash, is the first to show that sleep helps consolidate two competing memories.

The multitasking brain

Adding evidence to a growing idea that most areas of the brain have multiple overlapping functions, neurobiologist David Freedman, graduate student Chris Rishel, and former research technician Gang Huang have found that a part of the posterior parietal cortex, known to play a role in directing spatial attention and eye movements, also helps sort visual information into categories. For a study published in the March Neuron, the scientists taught monkeys to play a video game assigning moving patterns into categories, a task Freedman compared to an umpire calling balls and strikes. Measuring the electrical patterns of neurons in the animals’ parietal lobes, the researchers found the brain cells were simultaneously encoding eye movement and category-sorting information. Overlapping functions, Freedman says, may help boost the brain’s overall capacity. 

Asthma forecast

Children with two copies of a common genetic variation who also catch a wheezing cold early in life are likely to develop asthma by the age of 6. In fact, about 90 percent of them do, according to a study by Chicago researchers. The genetic variation, on chromosome 17, is associated with early-onset asthma. Studying two groups of children at high risk for asthma, one American and the other Danish, researchers found that a 50 percent likelihood of developing asthma with two copies of the genetic variation rose to 90 percent for  children who caught a rhinovirus accompanied by wheezing before they were 3 years old. The effect is not merely additive but interactive, researchers said. UChicago geneticists Carole Ober, Michelle Stein, Gaixin Du, and Dan Nicolae worked with researchers from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and the University of Copenhagen; their results were published in the March New England Journal of Medicine.

Psychopath scans

Lack of empathy is a hallmark characteristic of psychopathy, and a study by UChicago neuroscientists shows that it’s because psychopaths aren’t neurally equipped to care for others. Studying the brain responses of 80 convicted prisoners between 18 and 50—all men, all volunteers—using fMRI, the researchers showed them videos depicting facial expressions of pain and exposed them to scenarios of people being intentionally hurt. Those who’d scored high on psychopathy tests exhibited little activity in parts of the brain fundamental for empathy and concern for others. A collaboration between psychology professor Jean Decety, psychology graduate student Laurie Skelly, and University of New Mexico researcher Kent Kiehl, the study was published online April 24 in JAMA Psychiatry.