We are an interdisciplinary research team for breakthrough cognitive and neuroscience research specializing in "attention." Being based in Sungkyunkwan University (SKKU), our team is composed of top-notch researchers from various fields including lin...
We are an interdisciplinary research team for breakthrough cognitive and neuroscience research specializing in "attention." Being based in Sungkyunkwan University (SKKU), our team is composed of top-notch researchers from various fields including linguistics, neuroscience, physics, engineering, economics, and marketing. For the past eight months while we were supported by Korea Research Foundation, we have successfully accomplished a very important research mission of launching a truly interdisciplinary cognitive science research program, where "research integration" is taken seriously to achieve a fusion at a deep, core level. The initial launch of our research team was fueled by the "Knowledge Integration Forum" of SKKU beginning in December 2008. Since its conception, the members of this research team have regularly met to organize a new kind of integrated research infrastructure which will enable synergy and harmony among researchers of various research backgrounds encompassing liberal arts, social science, natural science, and engineering.
Our accomplishments in the first year can be summarized as the following four points. First, we were able to generate a number of significant research projects that are truly interdisciplinary at core levels. The research questions we have generated during this time include highly important and relevant research issues centering on attention and cognition, which have been ignored in the past because they could not be addressed in a single isolated discipline. Second, attention is key to learning and high-level cognition, yet there was no standardized protocol for measuring attention. We were able to establish a basis for a standardized protocol for attention. Future implications of a standardized attention protocol will be great for clinical, educational, and marketing purposes. Third, in order to disseminate our knowledge to public, about what it means to conduct integrated cognitive research, how to organize teams and mobilize synergy among seemingly unrelated research fields, we are writing an educational book entitled, "The New Frontier of Multidisciplinary Cognitive Science." Last, we are creating an integrative undergraduate program for cognitive science and team-taught an undergraduate class, "Mind and Language," which was well-received by undergraduate students. We have also involved students at undergraduate and graduate levels in our experimental projects as coauthors and educate the future generation for this line of integrative cognitive and neuroscience research.
Specific examples of our research projects that are being conducted in the first year are as the following: 1. ‘Attention and trust in exchange games’, 2. ‘Color and bilingual memory: a neuro-linguistic approach’, 3. ‘The effect of eye movement as a secondary task on word-recall’, 4.‘ Optical-spectroscopy study for brain activity’, 5. ‘Working memory, recognition and brand-name marketing‘ , 6. ’Recognition of text from screen display vs. hard copy‘, 7. ’Learning effect of dual task‘, 8. ’Attention to vocabulary in context measured by eye movement‘, 9. Frequency-based stylized sensitivity in L2 writing: the effect of implicit learning’, and, 10. ‘Language processing performance. These research projects centers on an integrative objective of establishing a new neuro-behavioral standard protocol for attention as a high-level cognitive function which explains how human mind works. Our next endeavor serves an educational purpose of disseminating this new knowledge to students and public. This book is being prepared by a multidisciplinary team of coauthors, "The New Frontier of Multidisciplinary Cognitive Science," will provide new insights into how various disciplines can be converged to creative a synergy in accomplishing breakthrough research for the future of cognitive science.