North Texas researchers find opportunities amid the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic

At the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, North Texas researcher Candice Mills had to quickly adapt and move more of her psychological experiments online, allowing her to recruit more diverse participants.

Chandramallika Basak, a cognitive neuroscientist, had to teach participants from her brain-training study how to use Microsoft Teams to connect with researchers, family and friends. And archaeologist Naomi Cleghorn brushed up on her data analysis skills to examine her South African dig site in 3-D.

They are among hundreds of scientists here and across the country who had to pivot as university research came to a grinding halt due to the pandemic. Many universities allowed only essential personnel into labs and stopped in-person clinical trials. In North Texas, some research labs are now open in limited capacities.

For these three Dallas-area researchers, bedrooms and spare spaces became summer offices and labs. Mills, Basak and Cleghorn creatively devised new analyses and programs to advance their research using technology at home.

Home memory tests

Before the pandemic, Basak’s neuroscience and cognition lab in the Center for Vital Longevity at UT-Dallas was investigating the effectiveness of a brain-training video game.

The goal of the video game is to help healthy older adults flex their mental “muscles” that naturally start to decline as people age, said Evan Smith, a graduate student in the lab.

After participants play the game, the researchers use psychology software to test participants’ visual working memories — how much visual information can be stored in the brain at one time to help complete ongoing tasks.

During the test, the researchers score participants’ memory using measures like the accuracy and speed at which they respond to images that appear on a screen.

The researchers also use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to look at whether playing the video game causes changes to the structure or activity of participants’ brains.

In March, the team had to stop taking brain scans. Without the scans, Basak can’t study whether the video game changes the brain over time. “We have asked for an extension [of our funding] since we can’t use all our brain imaging data,” said Basak.

But she could still investigate how the game affects participants’ memory. So the team delivered tablets loaded with the video game and psychology testing software to participants’ homes.

Participants can share their screens with researchers over Microsoft Teams while using the software. The researchers can then score a participant’s memory while watching.

Basak also used this time to encourage social distancing. “I used this [shutdown] as an opportunity to train our participants on a new tool [Microsoft Teams],” said Basak.”We encouraged older adults in our group to use more online tools to safely connect not only to us, but also to others, such as their friends and families.”

Like Basak, Mills took advantage of technology to advance her research. Mills, a psychologist at UT-Dallas, studies how kids learn and think critically. Her son’s Christmas wish for an expensive mini-Tesla actually inspired one of her current projects.

Mills and her team are asking other kids about Santa to investigate how children change their beliefs. The researchers send parents interview questions a couple days before meeting so that parents can review them. Then, the researchers get to chat with kids over Zoom about their beliefs and experiences.

This project started virtually and was easy for Mills and her team to continue when labs shut down.

But other studies, like one that investigates how effective guided play is at teaching preschoolers scientific concepts like camouflage, are harder to transition online. The researchers normally give kids lizard figurines to move around on top of a placemat with an outdoorsy scene and place a toy eagle “flying” nearby.

When a child moves the figurine to a place where it doesn’t blend in with the placemat, the toy eagle makes a sound and the researchers let the child know that the eagle can see the lizard. The researchers later test to see how well the kids learned the concept of camouflage. “We are exploring ways that we could make it possible to do a playful activity between the experimenter and the child online,” said Mills

In the meantime, Mills is working to increase the number and diversity of participants in her virtual studies. Mills collaborated with child development researchers at universities across the country to create Children Helping Science — an online platform where families can view active research projects that they can apply to join as participants from home.

“We can reach kids in ZIP codes that might not be able to get to the university,” said Mills.

The studies also give kids something to do during quarantine. “The studies are designed to use fun activities to capture something about how children think about the world,” said Mills. “We want these studies to be enjoyable.”

3-D analysis

Cleghorn also turned to technology during her time at home, and brushed up on her data analysis skills.

Cleghorn has been traveling to the coast of South Africa every summer since 2011. As an archaeologist, she wants to understand the origins of human behavior.

She and a team of students from UT-Arlington have been investigating the behaviors of people living between 18,000 and 50,000 years ago. Their dig site is a cave that looks out over the southern Indian Ocean. The sea level would have been lower 50,000 years ago, and instead of an ocean, the site would have faced an open plain.

Cleghorn wants to understand how people would have used the resources on that plain. But since the plain is now under rough coastal waters, the cave that the researchers work at could provide some clues.

Before the pandemic, the team worked each summer day to excavate materials from the cave. When the team finds an object, a special laser records its location. The object is then placed safely into a bag with a barcode that allows the researchers to connect the object in the bag with its location. In the lab, the researchers then clean and identify the object.

Since the team can’t travel to South Africa this summer, Cleghorn is brushing up on her analysis skills. She is working to connect identified objects with their locations at the dig site. That way, she can look at where all the objects are in a 3-D space.

“Archaeology is a really spatial process,” said Cleghorn. “We can link all of these components together [in 3-D] to answer questions like, where are all the shell fragments concentrated?”.

The team can then look at the 3-D data to learn more about the land. Looking at the objects in 3-D can help researchers determine what happened to the site at different periods in time, “like whether the accumulation of a layer is related to human activity or just natural sedimentation,” she said

So far, Cleghorn’s team has plotted about 89,000 objects from the dig site in 3-D.

The pandemic presents many challenges for researchers used to working in person. Though this summer was not what anyone had hoped, these three researchers turned their challenges into opportunities — for education, connection and advancement. Albert Einstein had it right when he said, “In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.”

Gina Mantica reports on science for The Dallas Morning News as part of a fellowship with the American Association for the Advancement of Science.