WASHINGTON — The National Academy of Sciences will honor four individuals with awards in recognition of their extraordinary scientific achievements in neuroscience and psychological and cognitive sciences.

John R. Anderson, Richard King Mellon Professor of Psychology and Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, and Carol S. Dweck, Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professor of Psychology at Stanford University, will receive the 2016 Atkinson Prizes in Psychological and Cognitive Sciences.

Anderson is best known for his efforts toward the development of a unified theory of cognition, called the Adaptive Control of Thought (ACT) cognitive model. The latest in the ACT series of models is ACT-R, a computational system that simulates human cognition using assumptions derived from psychological experiments. The ACT theory has served as the basis for a series of intelligent tutoring systems called “cognitive tutors” that provide students with interactive instruction in mathematics, giving customized feedback that guides users as they work through problems and learn. In 1998, a company was spun off from this research, and now hundreds of thousands of students benefit from these interactive systems.

Dweck has drawn from five areas of psychology — cognition, motivation, human development, personality, and social psychology — to show that, starting as children, people hold “mindsets” about intelligence. Some believe that intelligence is a fixed trait, like eye color. Others think that intelligence can be improved over time. Dweck showed that these mindsets, by shaping behavior and affecting learning over time, can have profound impacts on a person’s life. Dweck also showed that the praise given to a child can affect which mindset they hold and that parents and teachers can be educated to give praise to promote a healthier mindset. She has gone on to expand her concept of mindsets, showing that fixed and malleable mindsets exist in domains outside of intelligence, including prejudice, morality, conflict, and willpower.

The Atkinson Prizes in Psychological and Cognitive Sciences are given biennially to recognize significant advances in the psychological and cognitive sciences with important implications for formal and systematic theory in these fields. Each prize is presented with a $100,000 award.

Mortimer Mishkin, chief, Section on Cognitive Neuroscience at the National Institute of Mental Health, will receive the 2016 NAS Award in the Neurosciences.

Over the past 60 years, Mishkin has discovered some of the most important principles of brain organization, many of which are now considered fact in the field of neuroscience. Through the study of lesions in the brains of monkeys, Mishkin and Karl Pribram identified the visual functions of the inferior temporal cortex, establishing that this part of the brain is crucial for learning and retention of visual information. Mishkin and Leslie Ungerleider proposed that there were two visual systems within the primate brain — a ventral stream concerned with pattern vision (“what”) and a dorsal stream concerned with spatial vision (“where”). This theory now provides the foundation for nearly all work on cortical visual processing. In another important line of research, Mishkin has investigated the distinction between “cognitive” memories — specific events or facts — and “noncognitive” memories that are usually motor skills or habits. He and colleagues discovered that the noncognitive system depends on the integrity of the basal ganglia. And as acting chief of the Laboratory of Neuropsychology at the National Institute of Mental Health, Mishkin continues to make major contributions to our understanding of amnesia, memories, and the brain.

The NAS Award in the Neurosciences is given every three years to recognize extraordinary contributions to the progress of the neuroscience fields, including neurochemistry, neurophysiology, neuropharmacology, developmental neuroscience, neuroanatomy, and behavioral and clinical neuroscience. The award is presented with a $25,000 prize.

Alex L. Kolodkin, Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator and Charles J. Homcy and Simeon G. Margolis Professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, will receive the 2016 Pradel Research Award.

Kolodkin investigates how connections between neurons form and are maintained in both insect and mammal models. As a postdoc, he discovered the first member of the large semaphorin family of proteins, which includes membrane and secreted proteins that guide axon growth. Due to Kolodkin’s work investigating the functions of these proteins, semaphorins are now recognized as one of the most important families of axon guidance cues and are known to play critical roles in adult nervous system function and plasticity, neural regeneration, cancer cell proliferation and metastasis, immune system responses, and a range of other functions. More recently, Kolodkin addressed the longstanding mystery of how synaptic laminae, a key architectural feature of many neural systems, are specified during development, showing in a mouse model that repulsive guidance plays a critical role in directing retinal lamination and in orchestrating connectivity between retinal ganglion cells and their targets in the brain. Such discoveries have transformed our understanding of how developing neural circuits assemble.

The Pradel Research Award is given annually to recognize mid-career neuroscientists whose work is making major contributions to our understanding of the nervous system. The recipient is presented with a $50,000 research award.

David J. Freedman, associate professor, department of neurobiology at the University of Chicago, and Geoffrey F. Woodman, associate professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University, will receive the 2016 Troland Research Awards.

Freedman has been working to determine how the brain learns and recognizes visual categories by studying the activity of neural circuits during categorization tasks. He has made many discoveries about how neurons in the parietal, temporal, and frontal lobes of the brain learn and represent visual categories. And he has shown that while some neurons have very different responses to similar images that belong to separate categories, other neurons show gradations of activity that tracks the perceptual appearance of stimuli independent of their category membership. Such work is not only providing insight into visual learning, recognition, decision making, and memory but may also help people with diseases that can impair these functions, such as Alzheimer’s disease, attention deficit disorder, schizophrenia, and stroke.

Woodman has been working to unite techniques used to study the brain activity in humans with those used in animals, combining intracranial recording in monkeys with scalp recordings. Such work is helping to bridge the gap between research in humans and primates. Woodman has also made discoveries at the forefront of research on learning and memory. Recently he discovered that mild electrical stimulation applied to the medial frontal cortex resulted in improved learning and memory for approximately five hours. These findings also have implications for people with brain disorders. Woodman and his team, for instance, have performed similar research on people with schizophrenia and found that the technique could restore error-monitoring — the short but important pause healthy people take after making a mistake.

Two Troland Research Awards of $75,000 are given annually to recognize unusual achievement by young investigators and to further empirical research within the broad spectrum of experimental psychology.

The winners will be honored in a ceremony on Sunday, May 1, during the National Academy of Sciences' 153rd annual meeting.
 
The National Academy of Sciences is a private, nonprofit institution that was established under a congressional charter signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863. It recognizes achievement in science by election to membership, and — with the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Medicine — provides science, engineering, and health policy advice to the federal government and other organizations.

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