Luis Favela, an associate professor of and cognitive sciences at UCF, was selected for the three-year fellowship and joins the ranks of three other UCF researchers who are Scialog fellows.

“I am one of a very, very few philosophers to ever be selected for it,” Favela says.

Favela and 50 other researchers from across the nation will be working on the Scialog theme: Molecular Basis of Cognition.

Scialog stands for science and dialog and was created in 2010 by the oldest scientific institution in the U.S., the RCSA, which was established in 1912. It has supported more than 40 Nobel Prize winners.

“This honor is especially important for UCF’s Department of Philosophy, as it further demonstrates that our faculty are researchers worth paying attention to and honored,” Favela says.

For the Molecular Basis of Cognition theme, Favela and the other fellows will work to develop projects that provide further explanations of the functional architecture of the brain, including understanding how chemical signaling contributes to communication from neuron to neuron.

According to RCSA, these projects will contribute to a variety of brain-related issues, such as recovering from brain injuries and learning how to prevent neurodegenerative disease to advancing neuromorphic computing.

Favela and a neurobiologist from Boston University presented their project proposal —Evaluating the Fractal Brain Hypothesis via Analyses of High Resolution Neuroanatomical, Neuromolecular, and Neurodynamic Distributional Structures — at a recent Scialog meeting held in October. If selected from a highly competitive set of proposals, their team will receive $110,000 to fund the research for one year. The selections of the team will be announced in December 2022.

“This fellowship is an exciting opportunity,” Favela says. “I believe this speaks to my interdisciplinary strengths as a philosopher across various scientific fields, such as cognitive sciences, neuroscience, and psychology.”

Favela received his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Cincinnati, Ohio and joined UCF’s Department of Philosophy and Cognitive Sciences Program, part of UCF’s , in 2015.

The statement is frequently used to justify an action that is morally questionable, but not formally prevented by any kind of law or rule. We’re hearing it a lot in modern times, particularly in connection with politicians, their dealings in business, campaign finance, election processes and so on.

But it’s not just the best defense in Washington, D.C. We also hear it in our workplace, neighborhoods and social groups when someone wants to wriggle free from the discomfort of a bad choice come to light.

Rules and laws exist to protect and promote the function of communities. Yet, here lies one of many perennial chicken-or-egg problems: Which came first, compliance or ethics? We might tend to think that laws originate from moral convictions about what is right and wrong. But there are many interesting examples that challenge the perception that laws extend from morals.

For example, some things are immoral, yet perfectly legal. You can probably come up with many of your own powerful examples, but we’ll just offer a few. First, if you don’t tip at a restaurant, that’s not illegal; but it seems like a crime, especially when the service is good. Another example: Wealthy people and corporations are often hotly criticized for using loopholes, off-shore accounts, and other schemes to avoid tax. Yet businesses rely more heavily on publicly funded resources than individuals to generate wealth, including roads to ship goods and services, energy and communication infrastructure, law enforcement, national defense, and bureaucracies that support state, national and international trade.

So, trying to avoid paying taxes can’t be moral, but there are many legal ways to get away with it – so it’s legal, but immoral. Our own history offers the best and saddest example. Before the Civil War, slavery was legal in the U.S., but certainly not moral.

In the 1970s the federal highway speed limit was dropped to 55 miles per hour, not to save lives, but to decrease national consumption of petroleum. So, speeding then was illegal, but could we regard it now as immoral?

And there are many examples of the reverse, where an action might be illegal, but it’s not necessarily immoral. For example, in the 1970s the federal highway speed limit was dropped to 55 miles per hour, not to save lives but to decrease national consumption of petroleum. So, speeding then was illegal, but could we regard it now as immoral?

Some examples depend on cultural framing. Consider Singapore, where it’s illegal to sell gum, not because it’s immoral but to help promote public cleanliness. And up until very recently, it was illegal for women to drive in Saudi Arabia, in part because it was regarded as religiously immoral. This stands in stark contrast to Western mores, where driving is commonplace, and in the U.S. it’s a rite of passage for all 16-year-olds, including women.

So what is the relationship between legality and morality, between compliance and ethics? And what are the implications of giving someone a pass when they do something that is legal but that makes us flinch morally?

We certainly have an expectation that people will act morally and ethically, even when there is no law or legal enforcement to bring consequences. We particularly hope politicians would exceed legal standards and make ethical choices, because they are elected leaders who are meant to promote the best interests of all citizens.

Fundamentally, we are all supposed to do what is right, and not just follow the rules, and we even learn that as children. Think about it. Young children often claim: “But you didn’t say I couldn’t!” We tell our kids that does not make their actions right. So why would we expect anything less of adults, particularly elected leaders?

But more alarming than a politician skirting the rules is the ease with which their supporters often invoke: “Well, it’s not illegal.” Let’s go back to the schoolyard for some useful reminders of what our social standards are. We are alarmed by bullying, and not only are we telling kids not to bully, but we rebuke children who turn a blind eye to bullying. We tell our kids to speak out, defend the weak, etc. Similarly, whistle-blowing is being promoted by many national organizations, universities and even the federal government.

We want to catch the bad guys and promote justice. But how can that happen if we don’t speak up and call out immoral behavior, even when it is legal? Perhaps our willingness to give people a pass when they do bad things, even when they are legal, is undermining the likelihood that people will follow the rules, much less the spirit of the rule.

Stephen M. Kuebler is an associate professor of chemistry and optics in the Ů��AV’s Department of Chemistry and the College of Optics and Photonics. He can be reached at Stephen.Kuebler@ucf.edu.

Jonathan Beever is an assistant professor of ethics and digital culture in the Ů��AV’s Department of Philosophy and the Texts & Technology doctoral program. He can be reached at Jonathan.Beever@ucf.edu.

For Zargar, this means furthering his long-term goal of building connections among students and faculty to talk about religion, theology and social issues.

“I hope to make UCF a center of discussions—a center of learning where scholars and artists from around the U.S. and the world are heard by a curious and participating campus community,” says Zargar.

Zargar, who joined the UCF faculty last fall, has already made moves in advancing UCF’s . He hosted two public events in the fall, including a showing of the award-winning Iranian film The Color of Paradise, and is working with the university to create a new certificate in interfaith studies. His long-term goal is to build connections among students and faculty to talk about religion, theology and social issues.

Zargar believes Ů��AV is the optimal place for a program in Islamic Studies, which reaches into many disciplines, including religious studies, political science, modern languages and literature and more. “Ů��AV is not an ivory-tower sort of university,” says Zargar. “In each of the fields it offers for study, UCF has deep connections to the Orlando community. Interdisciplinarity is not scoffed at as being beneath the specialist—rather, it’s encouraged. Change is not seen as de-evolution—rather, it’s embraced.”

“Cultural study is the best way I can think of to teach empathy, self-awareness and global understanding.” — Jeff Moore, dean of College of Arts and Humanities

UCF Provost Elizabeth Dooley and College of Arts and Humanities Dean Jeff Moore presided over the investiture ceremony, which was held on Wednesday, Jan. 16, at the UCF FAIRWINDS Alumni Center.

“Cultural study is the best way I can think of to teach empathy, self-awareness and global understanding,” says Moore. “I look forward to the growth of the Islamic Studies program at UCF and to watching interfaith understanding and connectedness blossom under Dr. Zargar’s guidance.”

The event was attended by many members of the Islamic Center of Orlando, including Imam Tariq Rasheed. Rasheed, a UCF alumnus, led the charge in creating the new position by encouraging the financial support of hundreds of members of the Islamic Center.

“Perhaps what makes this position so distinctive is that it was not founded by one wealthy benefactor, not a government, nor a corporation, but rather by the Islamic Center of Orlando,” says Zargar. “Citizens of Orlando united by their common interest in promoting learning, dialogue, the study of religion, and the de-stigmatization of Islam and Muslims contributed to making their environment richer by giving of themselves.”

The Al-Ghazali Endowed Professorship was started in 2005 and the Islamic Studies program in 2011 with the overall goal of promoting the understanding and appreciation of Islam and Muslim communities.

Learn more about the Islamic Studies program and Zargar at .

from UCF, Associate Professor Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Noa Pinter-Wollman from the University of California at Los Angeles, Professor of Architectural and Urban Computing Alan Penn from University College London, and Research Director Guy Theraulaz from the Université de Toulouse in France are co-editors of a special issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.

The issue takes a broad and detailed interdisciplinary look at the interactions of human to human, mammal to mammal and insect to insect and how their built environments (from their offices to their nests) influence their behavior.

For humans, collective behavior is critical as they work on more and more complex tasks that require coordinating their varying forms of expertise by communicating and collaborating effectively to get their jobs done.

For example, companies often build “open floor plans” for their employees instead of smaller enclosed offices. Employers hope that these kinds of spaces will increase collaboration and communication because, for example, people can’t just hide in their offices. But research reported in this special issue shows that open-plan offices actually decrease face-to-face interactions. Another study in the special issue examined how an employee’s physical location in an organization changes collective behavior. That study found that an employee’s access to unique information might depend on the hallway paths around their desk (e.g., are they on the shortest path between other co-workers). This, in turn, can influence their status in the organization, or the prestige of the projects they are assigned.

“Working on this special issue was an exciting challenge and we hope it ignites interest in many others to pursue an interdisciplinary study of how the built environment influences collective behavior,” Fiore says. “We purposely designed the issue to introduce scholars to a variety of methods and concepts to spark ideas for adoption and adaption by others similarly interested in the broad topic of architecture and collective behavior.”

Collective behavior is not limited to humans. Biologists have been studying how insect behavior, like ants, is largely driven by the nests they build. These nests are very sophisticated and designed to include chambers that serve as nurseries and gardens.  These rooms and their functions are very complex and not well understood by scientists. That’s why Fiore and colleagues wanted to dedicate a special issue to the topic.

“Some scientists create physical models of insect nests, while others might write software code to simulate what interactions look like in that nest,” says Fiore. “Still others put sensors on insects to track how they move in and around their nests, and even how humans move around in their office buildings. Our goal was to bring together the many different researchers to share their ideas with each other and with other scientists.”

The journal’s special issue was supported by a grant from the National Academies of Sciences “Keck Futures Initiative.” The initiative aims to “stimulate new modes of scientific inquiry and break down barriers to interdisciplinary research in funding agencies, academic and other research settings, publication and academia.”  Fiore hopes that these methods can be used by scholars in other fields to help us better understand how collective behavior across the animal kingdom is influenced by the environments they build.

Fiore is a professor of cognitive sciences with the and the , and the director of the . He joined ��AV in 1998 and has multiple degrees including a doctorate in cognitive psychology from the University of Pittsburgh.

Stephen Fiore and Shawn Burke’s project is one of 27 selected from 18 institutions around the country, which will receive money from a $12 million pool over three years. The projects were selected because NASA is preparing to send astronauts on distant missions, including Mars.

Most of the studies selected will look at space travel’s impact on the human body, including visual impairment, bone and muscle loss, human performance, cardiovascular health, and sensory and motor adaptations, among other issues.

“This is important because studies suggest that cognitive processes may be negatively affected by the spaceflight context,” Fiore said. “So we need to understand how problems with memory or attention will impact the spaceflight team’s ability to function and successfully perform their mission.”

The idea is to mitigate the effects as much as possible, he said.

Fiore, the lead investigator, is director of the Cognitive Sciences Laboratory and a faculty member with the cognitive sciences program in the Department of Philosophy and the Institute for Simulation & Training.

Burke is a research professor at the IST specializing in team dynamics and behavior.

Burke said this is just one of several studies they have been working on for NASA that look at team dynamics. The others address issues such as leadership behavior, crew dynamics, impact of confined spaces on these dynamics, and cultural differences. NASA has been funding the grants the past couple of years, she said.

This project is funded by the agency’s Human Research Program and the National Space Biomedical Research Institute, which seek to answer questions on astronaut health and performance in long-duration space missions. The Human Research Program also plans strategies to monitor and mitigate risks humans may face on missions.

NASA has been pushing to return astronauts to the moon by 2020. That effort would be in preparation to travel to Mars, a planet believed to be capable of hosting life, and possibly beyond.

The goal of the current studies is to better prepare astronauts to manage the mental and physical demands of space travel.

Some of the studies will be conducted aboard the International Space Station, NASA said. Others, including UCF’s studies, will be conducted in settings that mimic the space environment.

Maybe it was standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon, or witnessing birth, or walking along the beach at sunrise.

A team of ��AV researchers thinks those feelings of awe and wonder can be scientifically studied, and recently finished a two-year project to better understand the experiences of those emotions and their relationship to religious and spiritual beliefs.

As part of the project, the researchers held an Orlando conference attended by about 60 neuroscientists, philosophers, psychologists, and art historians from around the world to discuss their findings and how to apply them to future uses, from providing  medical treatments to swaying movie audiences.

The research, supported by a $300,000 grant from the John Templeton Foundation, got its genesis from the frequent comments of returning astronauts who talk about how they were changed by the emotional experience of spaceflight, often spiritually, said Lauren Reinerman, assistant research professor in the UCF Institute for Simulation and Training.

“We wanted to know if we could assess the physiological and psychological responses of awe and wonder and better understand that experience,” she said.

For the purposes of the study, the researchers defined awe as “a direct and initial feeling when faced with something incomprehensible or sublime.” Wonder was defined as “a more reflective feeling one has when unable to put things back into a familiar conceptual framework.”

Researchers used an interdisciplinary approach to create a simulation of space travel for the purpose of gathering neurophysiological and phenomenological data. Phenomenology is the study of the development of human consciousness and self-awareness.

“Even though astronauts come from a variety of backgrounds, including military, engineering and science, the awesomeness of viewing earth from a shuttle or gazing into the vastness of the universe from the ISS [International Space Station] elicits states of AW [awe and wonder],” according to the study, “Going one step further, many astronauts report a paradigm of feeling that there must be something bigger out there, something holding everything together. Many astronauts have written about these deeply aesthetic, spiritual and religious experiences.”

For the study, researchers individually tested 79 people in rooms designed to mimic space vehicles. On a 120-degree screen, test subjects visibly experienced a countdown, liftoff and spaceflight around the earth and through deep space.

The “flights” of the subjects lasted 12 minutes.

Beforehand they were questioned about their backgrounds, traits and religious beliefs. During the tests, monitors recorded brain and heart functions that correlated to the visual and emotional timeline. And afterward, the subjects were questioned about stress, their reflections and thoughts of themselves.

Results showed that the test subjects said they experienced varying degrees of awe and wonder.

Reinerman said the people who identified themselves as more religious actually were less prone to report awe and wonder. Perhaps they just thought “This is God’s work,” and already expected it to be awesome, she said.

Reinerman said the team’s findings are relevant for better understanding and predicting what astronauts might experience during long-term space flight, and that commercial space flight might benefit by informing training simulators how to prepare people for experiencing space.

The researchers said they imagine that one day their findings can be applied to other fields.

“It is expected that our results will inform future research for investigating the development of improved or alternative treatments for people with PTSD, autism, anxiety disorders, maybe even diabetes, or even just everyday stress,” Reinerman said. “The sense of peace and the introspection that was reported to occur while participants viewed our simulated space visuals might be beneficial for incorporation into therapeutic practices. The simulation is a way, in a sense, to help people ‘meditate’ or reflect; it puts life to the idea of visualization that is often practiced in treatment.”

She said that capturing the visual stimuli that influence the experience of awe, wonder, curiosity, humility, and other emotions also could help the entertainment industry construct environments that invoke those experiences.

Bruce Janz, a philosopy professor involved with the project and the chair of the department, said the study’s approach was a different way of doing philosophy that focuses on the human experiences we have, and how they relate to who we are.

“Thinking about experiences like awe and wonder…rarely do we get a chance to think about what those experiences mean for us as humans in such an unusual place as space,” Janz said. “To be able to rethink how we ask about awe and wonder from the point of view of life in space adds an important perspective to how we think about philosophy.”

Others involved in the study were Shaun Gallagher, a former Ů��AV philosophy professor who helped start the project and now is at the University of Memphis, and Brandon Sollins, a research assistant at UCF’s Institute for Simulation and Training.

The research team is working to secure additional funding to expand the project.

“Some findings surprised us,” said Patricia Bockelman, a graduate research assistant. “We’d like to think everyone experiences awe and wonder sometimes but empirically nobody is looking at this across the board.”

Led by researchers from the Institute for Simulation & Training (IST), the Department of Philosophy and the College of Medicine, the study will attempt to answer the question, “Why do astronauts and other space travelers consistently describe their experiences as aesthetic, spiritual or religious?”

This will be the first-ever scientific study of these experiences as it attempts to link philosophy and the humanities with cognitive and neural sciences.

The John Templeton Foundation, a philanthropic organization dedicated to “supporting science – investing in the Big Questions,” will fund the two-year, $300K effort. Principal Investigators include: Shaun Gallagher and Stephen Fiore (Philosophy/IST), Bruce Janz (Philosophy), Stephanie Lackey, Lauren Reinerman and Eileen Smith (IST), and Garrett Riggs (College of Medicine, Neurology).

The various team members will (1) analyze astronaut reports in detail, (2) select NASA photographs for use in experiments, (3) compare astronaut experiences to those created in a virtual environment, (4) measure effects on physiology and brain changes, (5) study precisely the environmental conditions present, and (6) show how all these factors are interrelated.

Since setting up a lab in a corner of the International Space Station is out of the question, researchers will design and build a virtual environment at IST. The Virtual Space Lab (VSL) will be a test bed for experiments that will attempt to recreate the awe and wonder space travelers experience.

Researchers from the Bildakt research group at Humboldt University (Berlin) will study the specific images from the NASA archive to be used in the VSL. UCF’s Bruce Janz and Shaun Gallagher and philosophy graduate students from the University of Memphis will do the hermeneutical (textual) analysis and post-experiment interviews with subjects.

On the experimental side, three labs from IST will collaborate to design and run experiments that explore the experiences of participants in the VSL. Stephanie Lackey and Lauren Reinerman will direct the work of IST’s ACTIVE lab, Eileen Smith will manage her E2i lab’s participation and Stephen Fiore the Cognitive Sciences Lab’s contribution.

The team will use near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) technology to study brain processes and subjective reactions of participants in the VSL. Dr. Garrett Riggs from the UCF College of Medicine and Dr. Jonathan Cole from the University of Bournemouth (UK) will provide neuroscientific support.

SDES strives to develop leaders by actively engaging students in holistic development, allowing students the opportunity to create and apply ideas, learn about themselves, their community and their world. SDES encourages the UCF community members to continue to develop open, honest and meaningful relationships based on mutual respect.

SDES believes that leadership involves collaborative relationships that lead to collective action, grounded in the shared values of people who work together to affect positive change.

A leader is not necessarily someone who holds a formal position of leadership or who is perceived as a leader by others. Rather, a leader is one who is able to influence positive change within themselves, for the betterment of others, the community, and society.

In SDES, we are all educators. We are all life-long learners. We are all potential leaders.

Visit SDES Web site: .

The new area of study, called the “science of team science,” or SciTS (rhymes with sights), focuses on what works and what doesn’t when teams of scientists are working together to accomplish an overarching research goal. Improving teamwork in these situations is important, says Joann Keyton, a professor of communication at NC State and co-author of the paper, because research initiatives increasingly involve researchers in different disciplines, at different institutions and, often, in different countries.

The paper represents the first time that physical scientists, life scientists and social scientists have come together to address SciTS. Their goal, Keyton says, is to let the research community know that the dynamics of team research are now a recognized field of study, and that they are increasingly important to both public and private research funding agencies.

This paper was co-authored by Stephen Fiore, an associate professor of Cognitive Sciences in UCF’s Philosophy Department and director of the Cognitive Sciences Laboratory at the Institute for Simulation and Training.

Improving teamwork in interdisciplinary collaborations is going to become more  important for researchers who hope to get funding from public or private sources. “This is going to affect policy,” Keyton says. “When people apply for grants, they’re going to be asked to demonstrate that they understand how teams can effectively work together. Simply assembling a team isn’t going to be enough for funding agencies anymore – funding agencies want to know that the team will be adequately supported and able to function successfully.

“Team science raises new challenges,” Keyton says. “Language is often a problem. For example, scientists in different disciplines may use the same term to refer to very different things. There can be a major misunderstanding between researchers on the same research team, and they won’t even know it.”

The increasing complexity of both scientific problems, and the teams that are assembled to tackle them, creates an opportunity for social scientists to help identify, characterize and resolve problems related to working collaboratively.

“Substantial gain in understanding can be made when ideas and methods from different disciplines are used to address a single, yet complex, problem,” Fiore said. “The challenge comes from ensuring the scientists build a shared and multidisciplinary understanding of the problem they are trying to solve.”

The paper, “A Multi-Level Systems Perspective for the Science of Team Science,” is published in the Sept. 15 issue of Science Translational Medicine. The paper was co-authored by researchers from Indiana University, Northwestern University, the Ů��AV, the National Cancer Institute, the University of California – Irvine, and Cornell University.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This content was adapted from a news release issued by North Carolina State University.

• Professor Peter Hancock is the modern day Renaissance man, crossing discipline boundaries with ease. Neville Stanton, Brunel University, UK
• A delightful and penetrating philosophy of purpose and process in human-machine-society interactions, as only Peter Hancock can render it – liberally spiced with history, humor and erudition. Tom Sheridan, Massachusetts Institute of Technology , USA
• Mind, Machine and Morality is a masterwork by one of the great scientists and thinkers of our time. Robert R. Hoffman, Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, USA
• An amazing breadth of ideas and concepts that will challenge readers to reassess the way they have framed human interaction with technology. John D. Lee, University of Iowa, USA

About the Author:

Peter A. Hancock is Provost Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of Psychology, the , and the Department of at the ��AV.

For the full book reviews, visit .