Rashelle Hoffman and Jacy VerMaas, two Munroe-Meyer Institute physical therapy graduate research assistants in the lab of Max Kurz, Ph.D., have been awarded NASA Nebraska Fellowship Grants.
The grants focus on research that could have applications within the space program.
Hoffman, a licensed physical therapist, received her award for a project focused on “dual-tasking,” something everyone does on a daily basis — combining two activities, such as driving while listening to music, or walking and talking.
“The neural correlates — the ways the brain works — are not well understood during dual-tasking,” Hoffman said. “My project looks to explore that, to help us understand what areas are activated when you dual task.”
Understanding dual-tasking has obvious implications for the space program, where astronauts are consistently called upon to multitask, she said.
“When you dual task, there’s usually a decline in one or both of the tasks you are performing,” she said. “And if we can better understand what’s going on in the brain, we can then understand how to be better at dual tasking.”
VerMaas’s project will explore how people process visual and haptic (“touch”) information, trying to quantify how that information in weighted in the brain.
“For example, when you are looking at something or when you’re touching someone, what sense dominates?” she said. “Which do you use more in order to explore your environment?”
VerMaas, a licensed occupational therapist, also will work with children to see if the “weighting” changes with age, setting up for future research that will explore the brain areas that are used to process this information.
“But first, we’re trying to understand how this information is weighted behaviorally and how this changes with age,” she said.
VerMaas pointed out that in extreme environments (such as space), senses can be altered, so it becomes important to understand how a person uses their senses to explore their environment.
Hoffman and VerMaas will finish their projects in February and present in April at a conference to be held at Nebraska Wesleyan University.
VerMaas and Hoffman continue an MMI tradition, becoming the fourth and fifth members of Dr. Kurz lab to receive NASA Fellowships. In previous years, Jamie Gehringer, Brenda Davies and David Arpin also were fellows.