Stay ConnectedAshley Juavinett, PhD and Cat Hicks, PhD explore technical skills, the science of innovation, STEM pathways, and our beliefs about who gets to be technical—so you can be a better leader and we can all build a better future.
Ashley, a neuroscientist, and Cat, a psychologist for software teams, tell stories of change from classrooms to workplaces.
Also, they’re married.
Copyright: © 2024 Change, Technically
SHOW NOTES:
For an example of a consideration of learning with information searching, a paper by Saskia Giebl and co-authors explored students learning basic programming concepts aided with a search engine and how active problem-solving before the search helps encourage stronger learning. This paper draws from a lot of the classic learning science/memory effects that Cat references:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1475725720961593
“Cognitive offloading” is a concept with a lot of interesting work behind it, and cognitive offloading can be as broad as just making a grocery list. Exploring task performance, and the mixed costs and benefits associated with cognitive offloading, can be started with this review and its citations: https://www.nature.com/articles/s44159-025-00432-2
Andrew Hogan wrote a nice post for parents concerned about their children's learning and brain health here, centering on helping people understand the limitations of study methodology: https://www.parent.tech/p/should-your-kids-use-chatgpt-for-homework-c028
Robert and Elizabeth Bjork and colleagues have published many relevant papers on the generation effect and other aspects of learning and metacognition about learning. Here are a few references Cat recommends:
Because Ashley loves giving people an opportunity to play with the data for themselves, here’s an online interactive textbook with an introduction to EEG: https://neuraldatascience.io/7-eeg/introduction.html
Research on the seductive power of putting a brain on it:
Paper which nicely explains the dDTF technique step-by-step and applies it to understand motor imagery: https://braininformatics.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40708-022-00154-8
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Notes:
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Cat wants you to know she read a *lot* of research for this episode. Major highlights we specifically drew from, and quote sources, were aross three reviews:
Cat found this one especially helpful and refers to it the most, and this review also proposes the Interpretation Account of math anxiety:
Ramirez, G., Shaw, S. T., & Maloney, E. A. (2018). Math anxiety: Past research, promising interventions, and a new interpretation framework. Educational psychologist, 53(3), 145-164.
Amland, T., Grande, G., Scherer, R., Lervåg, A., & Melby-Lervåg, M. (2024). Cognitive factors underlying mathematical skills: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin.
Chang, H., & Beilock, S. L. (2016). The math anxiety-math performance link and its relation to individual and environmental factors: A review of current behavioral and psychophysiological research. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 10, 33–38.
We briefly mentioned tDCS. An introduction to this technique (used both for therapeutic applications and in scientific studies) can be found here: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5702643/
The specific study Cat & Ashley talk about, with math anxious adults, is this one: Sarkar, A., Dowker, A., & Cohen, K. R. (2014). Cognitive enhancement or cognitive cost: Trait-specific outcomes of brain stimulation in the case of mathematics anxiety. The Journal of Neuroscience, 34, 16605–16610. doi:10.1523/jneurosci.3129-14.2014
Cat also mentions the connection between teachers’ gender stereotype endorsements and teachers’ math anxiety, and students’ math achievement. This study is here: Beilock, S. L., Gunderson, E. A., Ramirez, G., & Levine, S. C. (2010). Female teachers’ math anxiety affects girls’ math achievement. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(5), 1860-1863.
Further helpful reading & evidence about both parental and teachers’ impact on math attitudes and gender from the same authors:
Gunderson, E. A., Ramirez, G., Levine, S. C., & Beilock, S. L. (2012). The role of parents and teachers in the development of gender-related math attitudes. Sex roles, 66, 153-166.
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How do human beings work together and learn to be, well, human? Stepping out of our comfortable and cozy silos and learning to communicate our value in new contexts might just be the key to unlocking shared innovation.
In this episode, we explore this question with Cristine Legare, a psychology professor at the University of Texas at Austin interested in the interplay of the universal human mind and the variations of culture, who studies cognitive and cultural evolution and the design of social and behavioral change interventions.
The Center for Applied Cognitive Science, which Cristine founded and directs: https://www.centerforappliedcogsci.com/
Her website, where you can keep up with more of her work as well as her upcoming book on ritual: https://cristinelegare.com/
Cat also mentions the book How Infrastructure Works, which is by Deb Chachra and can be found here: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/612711/how-infrastructure-works-by-deb-chachra/
Cat mentions an overlay journal she and her collaborators write to translate more scientific papers for software teams; it's called The Developer Science Review and you can read our issues here: https://dsl.pubpub.org/issues
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In a special edition of Change, Technically, Ashley and Cat get into the facts of the NIH: what it does, how it works, and the consequences of disrupting its essential work. The NIH creates enormous economic impact, 400,000 jobs across the US, and sets science in motion that touches all of us.
How to contact your representatives:
Relevant executive orders:
Study on new drugs and NIH funding:
E. Galkina Cleary, J.M. Beierlein, N.S. Khanuja, L.M. McNamee, F.D. Ledley, Contribution of NIH funding to new drug approvals 2010–2016, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 115 (10) 2329-2334, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1715368115 (2018).
United for Medical Research resource where you can look up NIH impact for your state along with many resources about NIH impact: https://www.unitedformedicalresearch.org/
News articles on pausing of NIH meetings and travel:
Information about STARTneuro:
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In this special 'Change, Technically: Holidays On The Couch' edition of the podcast, Ashley & Cat discuss their philosophies of measurement and goal tracking, debate the value of data, and ponder the behavioral science of doing the stuff we resolve to do.
Notes:
Cat & Ashley mention this essay: https://issues.org/limits-of-data-nguyen/
Show correction: Ashley wrongly said the Nguyen essay above had reminded her about Goodhart’s Law (the idea that as soon as we measure something, it loses meaning). Rather, she re-discovered it in Calling Bullshit by Carl Bergstrom and Jevin D. West. Ashley’s error explains why Cat was so confused about her comments on the essay, oops. :)
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Much like open source software, open science is a path to distributed collaboration. By sharing the data from experiments and investigations open and available, scientists can multiply impact and discovery for teams they've never even met.
Our guest, Saskia de Vries, talks to us about her work at the Allen Institute, including accelerating the pace of discovery by making scientific data available to everyone who wants it.
Credits
Saskia de Vries, guest
Ashley Juavinett, host + producer
Cat Hicks, host + producer
Danilo Campos, producer + editor
You can learn more about the Allen Institute on their website: https://alleninstitute.org/
Read some of Saskia's recent thoughts on sharing data in neuroscience here: https://elifesciences.org/articles/85550
The CRCNS open data repository that Saskia mentions: https://crcns.org/
Read about the FAIR principles for scientific data management and stewardship: https://www.nature.com/articles/sdata201618
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Can creativity mean more for software than productivity? Do we need to let go of “hardcore developer stuff”? Will getting more people to major in computer science fix everything? Ashley and Cat chat with Change, Technically’s first guest star SUE SMITH about developer learning and the future of software teams as technology changes.
Credits
Sue Smith, guest
Ashley Juavinett, host + producer
Cat Hicks, host + producer
Danilo Campos, producer + editor
While not mentioned in the episode, we would be remiss if we did not link you to Sue's illustrated collections of HTTP status codes:
- Golden Girls variant
- Keanu Reeves variant
Cat mentioned this paper by Dr. Natasha Quadlin as an example of how the same achievement information can be interpreted very differently by biased viewers during hiring:
Quadlin, N. (2018). The mark of a woman’s record: Gender and academic performance in hiring. American sociological review, 83(2), 331-360.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0003122418762291
Dr. Quadlin has many fascinating projects on inequality and a book with Brian Powell tackling questions about inequality and college: https://www.russellsage.org/publications/who-should-pay
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Neuroscience is the hottest STEM field. Why? What does a neuroscientist actually do? Is the brain some mechanically deterministic box configured at birth? Cat knows Ashley has the answers, and now you will, too.
Credits
Ashley Juavinett, host + producer
Cat Hicks, host + producer
Danilo Campos, producer + editor
For an incisive breakdown of “the crimes against dopamine” please read the piece of that title by Mark Humphries.
The myth of mental illness book that Ashley mentioned was written in 1961 and we don’t really think it’s worth reading.
The longitudinal fMRI study that Ashley contributed to while in graduate school: Stewart JL, Juavinett AL, May AC, Davenport PW, Paulus MP (2015) Do you feel alright? Attenuated neural processing of aversive interoceptive stimuli in current stimulant users. Psychophysiology 52:249–262.
This is the Twitter/X account that highlights when a study happens IN MICE: https://x.com/justsaysinmice. And here’s the creator’s motivation: https://jamesheathers.medium.com/in-mice-explained-77b61b598218
The study that recorded from someone’s brain while they died is Vicente et al. (2022) Enhanced Interplay of Neuronal Coherence and Coupling in the Dying Human Brain. Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience 14. See also this commentary about their claims.
We once again mentioned field-specific ability beliefs. Here’s Cat’s blogpost on her own research.
This study explores the basic dynamics of field-specific ability beliefs and shows their connection to gender inequities in academic disciplines: Leslie, S. J., Cimpian, A., Meyer, M., & Freeland, E. (2015). Expectations of brilliance underlie gender distributions across academic disciplines. Science, 347(6219), 262-265.
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What makes someone technical? What are our preconceptions about "technical" skills? How do those beliefs influence outcomes, and the success of who we include? Ashley and Cat dig in.
Credits
Ashley Juavinett, host + producer
Cat Hicks, host + producer
Danilo Campos, producer + editor
On Communities of Practice, Ashley has published a paper on the impact of the program she co-directs:
Zuckerman, A. L., Juavinett, A. L., Macagno, E. R., Bloodgood, B. L., Gaasterland, T., Artis, D., & Lo, S. M. (2022). A case study of a novel summer bridge program to prepare transfer students for research in biological sciences. Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Science Education Research, 4(1), 27. Available here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s43031-022-00067-w
On Ambient Belonging, here is a great representative article that includes the evidence Ashley was sharing about the impact that stereotypical cues can have for women in technical spaces:
Cheryan, S., Plaut, V. C., Davies, P. G., & Steele, C. M. (2009). Ambient belonging: how stereotypical cues impact gender participation in computer science. Journal of personality and social psychology, 97(6), 1045. PDF here:
https://sparq.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj19021/files/media/file/cheryan_et_al._2009_-_ambient_belonging.pdf
The cogsci paper Cat mentioned is this one: Fendinger, N. J., Dietze, P., & Knowles, E. D. (2023). Beyond cognitive deficits: how social class shapes social cognition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 27(6), 528-538.
Here's an article that's a good introduction to Alison Gopnik's Child as Scientist work:
Gopnik, A. (2012). Scientific thinking in young children: Theoretical advances, empirical research, and policy implications. Science, 337(6102), 1623-1627.
https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.1223416
Cat mentioned Contest Cultures in tech and Field-specific ability beliefs. Here’s Cat’s blogpost on her own research.
This is a study that explores how Contest Cultures lead to exclusion: Vial, A. C., Muradoglu, M., Newman, G. E., & Cimpian, A. (2022). An emphasis on brilliance fosters masculinity-contest cultures. Psychological Science, 33(4), 595-612.
And this study explores the basic dynamics of field-specific ability beliefs and shows their connection to gender inequities in academic disciplines: Leslie, S. J., Cimpian, A., Meyer, M., & Freeland, E. (2015). Expectations of brilliance underlie gender distributions across academic disciplines. Science, 347(6219), 262-265.
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