Search for: All records

In 2020, the combination of police killings of unarmed Black people, including George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, and the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic brought about public outrage over long-standing inequalities in society. The events of 2020 ignited global attention to systemic racism and racial inequalities, including the lack of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the academy and especially in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM) fields. Racial and ethnic diversity in graduate programs in particular warrants special attention as graduate students of color report experiencing alarming rates of racism, discrimination, microaggressions, and other exclusionary behaviors. As part of the Graduate Dean’s Advisory Council on Diversity (GDACD) at the University of California Merced, the authors of this manuscript held a year-long discussion on these issues and ways to take meaningful action to address these persistent issues of injustices. We have outlined 10 rules to help graduate programs develop antiracist practices to promote racial and ethnic justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (JEDI) in the academy. We focus on efforts to address systemic causes of the underrepresentation and attrition of students from minoritized communities. The 10 rules are developed to allow graduate groups to formulate and implement rules and policies to address root causes of underrepresentation of minoritized students in graduate education. 

Abstract Humans and other complex organisms exhibit intelligent behaviors as individual agents and as groups of coordinated agents. They can switch between independent and collective modes of behavior, and flexible switching can be advantageous for adapting to ongoing changes in conditions. In the present study, we investigated the flexibility between independent and collective modes of behavior in a simulated social foraging task designed to benefit from both modes: distancing among ten foraging agents promoted faster detection of resources, whereas flocking promoted faster consumption. There was a tradeoff between faster detection versus faster consumption, but both factors contributed to foraging success. Results showed that group foraging performance among simulated agents was enhanced by  loose coupling  that balanced distancing and flocking among agents and enabled them to fluidly switch among a variety of groupings. We also examined the effects of more sophisticated cognitive capacities by studying how human players improve performance when they control one of the search agents. Results showed that human intervention further enhanced group performance with loosely coupled agents, and human foragers performed better when coordinating with loosely coupled agents. Humans players adapted their balance of independent versus collective search modes in response to the dynamics of simulated agents, thereby demonstrating the importance of adaptive flexibility in social foraging. 

We investigated the hypothesis that infants search in an acoustic space for vocalisations that elicit adult utterances and vice versa, inspired by research on animal and human foraging. Infant-worn recorders were used to collect day-long audio recordings, and infant speech-related and adult vocalisation onsets and offsets were automatically identified. We examined vocalisation-to-vocalisation steps, focusing on inter-vocalisation time intervals and distances in an acoustic space defined by mean pitch and mean amplitude, measured from the child’s perspective. Infant inter-vocalisation intervals were shorter immediately following a vocal response from an adult. Adult intervals were shorter following an infant response and adult inter-vocalisation pitch differences were smaller following the receipt of a vocal response from the infant. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that infants and caregivers are foraging vocally for social input. Increasing infant age was associated with changes in inter-vocalisation step sizes for both infants and adults, and we found associations between response likelihood and acoustic characteristics. Future work is needed to determine the impact of different labelling methods and of automatic labelling errors on the results. The study represents a novel application of foraging theory, demonstrating how infant behaviour and infant-caregiver interaction can be characterised as foraging processes.