Awards help scholars change course

Recognizing that disciplines and research programs evolve during a faculty member’s career, the College of Arts and Sciences has awarded New Directions Fellowships for Mid-Career Faculty to three professors.

The awards, available to associate professors preparing for promotion, provide $10,000 a year for two years.

“The New Directions Fellowships continue to support exciting new research,” says Donald E. Hall, the Herbert and Ann Siegel Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. “The faculty selected this year will develop areas of scholarship that undoubtedly will expand the academic discussion and provide new perspectives in their particular disciplines.”

This year’s recipients are Kate Arrington, associate professor of psychology; Anna Chupa, associate professor of art, architecture and design (AAD); and Padraig (Pat) O’Seaghdha, associate professor of psychology.

Using EEGs to shed light on multitasking

Arrington has studied cognitive control using a voluntary task-switching paradigm she developed a decade ago. Support from the fellowship will allow her to incorporate electroencephalographic (EEG) recording techniques into her research on cognitive control processes.

EEGs record the electrical activity generated by cortical neurons. The EEG recording techniques will enable Arrington to examine the brain’s activity at the time of specific cognitive events.

Expanding on her previous research into cognitive control during multitasking, Arrington has identified specific EEG markers associated with task selection and task preparation, which she will be investigating as part of her New Directions Fellowship. The award also will also provide Arrington with support to attend workshops for EEG analysis.

“The New Directions Fellowship will allow me to receive training in state-of-the-art neural recording techniques,” says Arrington. “Adding EEG to my research skill set will open up the exciting opportunity to examine cognitive processes in the millisecond time scale in which they unfold. I will be able to pull apart and precisely measure the task selection and preparation processes that support volitional action in multitask environments.”

Painting with thread

Chupa, who is also associate chair of the AAD department, will use the New Directions Fellowship to expand on the tiles designs she makes based on Islamic architecture in southern Spain. In this work, Chupa extracts photographs of plant details, montages them into still life compositions and embeds them into tiles. These tiles are arranged into patterns to create original textile designs, which Chupa quilts using a longarm quilting machine.

Chupa’s previous work also includes an extensive photographic study of New Orleans Vodun temple altars. Her photography and textiles have been accepted into national and international juried exhibitions.

The New Directions Fellowship will allow Chupa to expand her study of textile design and to work on botanical drawings, which she will “paint” with thread, sequins and a technique called couching. Couching gives texture to a quilt by using a stitch that allows fibers to be added onto the surface of the quilt. It is done by hand or machine, often with a zigzag stitch across the surface of the fiber that captures a fiber and fastens it to the quilt. The result is a dense surface resembling embroidery. The fellowship will support Chupa’s efforts to develop original quilt pattern designs and expand her work beyond Islamic tiling patterns.

“Instead of the traditional pieced quilt, I create whole cloth quilts from my textile designs,” says Chupa. “The New Directions Fellowship gives me the opportunity to acquire Art and Stitch software, which enables me to convert vector drawings into stitches using my photographs as reference material.

“At that point, the stitching can be automated by the computer on the longarm machine. Up until now, I have been using hand-guided or freehand machine quilting. Now I can use the automated process with stitchery I have designed so that every step of the process from the fabric to the quilting is my design.”

The path from knowledge to language

O’Seaghdha, who has also served as director of Lehigh’s cognitive science program, specializes in the field of language production. He studies dynamic changes in the memorized mappings from thoughts to words as a function of contexts of use. These changes may employ a fundamental learning mechanism that strengthens the accessibility of recently selected words while at the same time down-regulating words that were simultaneously in mind but were left unspoken. This makes the unspoken words less available for subsequent use over significant time spans.

O’Seaghdha’s research includes behavioral experiments, an fMRI neuroscience component (conducted at Lehigh Valley Health Network with Dr. Kevin Bannon and Lehigh psychology professors Almut Hupbach and Dominic Packer), and computational work in collaboration with Hector Muñoz-Avila, associate professor of computer science and engineering. The project links previously separate memory and language research domains, and examines semantic re-mapping in contexts that draw on different components of meaning (e.g., simple object recognition, problem solving) and across languages in bilinguals. It was previously supported by a Collaborative Research Opportunity (CORE) award from Lehigh.

“This fellowship comes at a great time in supporting the new semantic direction of my research,” says O’Seaghdha. “The coordination of knowledge and language in speaking is perhaps the most fundamental problem in my field, one that has been largely deferred because of its difficulty. But advances in science are bringing solutions within our reach.

“It is very exciting to study one facet of this problem through a fundamental learning process that runs unobtrusively in the background of our mental and linguistic lives, and that provides a window both on the substrates of meaning and on how meaning-to-word mappings are continuously updated as we engage with the world in various ways.”

Story by Robert Nichols