Tacc Podcasts

The Supersized Science podcast features research and discoveries nationwide enabled by advanced computing technology and expertise at the Texas Advanced Computing Center of the University of Texas at Austin. Jorge Salazar, a science writer at TACC, hosts the podcast. Scientists are using TACC’s Maverick2 supercomputer and data from the game Ebb and Flow by Lumosity to train deep learning models that mimic the human behavior of “task-switching,” shifting attention from one task to another. This basic research is important for helping scientists understand cognitive control, which encompasses the basic mental processes that allow one to focus on the task at hand, but also flexibly disengage from the task if the need arises. These abilities are taxed by the game Ebb and Flow that the researchers studied. The research may also inform the understanding of diseases in which patients exhibit deficits in cognitive control, such as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. A study that developed new and more realistic m