Architectural research and its enemies

Like the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) that preceded it, the UK government's proposed Research Excellence Framework (REF) is a means of allocating funding in higher education to support research. As with any method for the competitive allocation of funds it creates winners and losers and inevitably generates a lot of emotion among those rewarded or penalised. More specifically, the 'winners' tend to approve of the method of allocation and the 'losers' denigrate it as biased against their activities and generally unfair. An extraordinary press campaign has been consistently waged against research assessment and its methods by those involved in architectural education, which I will track over a decade and a half. What follows will question whether this campaign demonstrates the sophistication and superior judgment of those who have gone into print, or conversely whether its mixture of misinformation and disinformation reveals not just disenchantment and prejudice, but a naivety and a depth of ignorance about the fundamentals of research that is deeply damaging to the credibility of architecture as a research-based discipline. With the recent consultation process towards a new cycle of research assessment, the REF, getting under way, I aim to draw attention to the risk of repeating past mistakes. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2010.

Neural activity associated with the passive prediction of ambiguity and risk for aversive events.

In economic decision making, outcomes are described in terms of risk (uncertain outcomes with certain probabilities) and ambiguity (uncertain outcomes with uncertain probabilities). Humans are more averse to ambiguity than to risk, with a distinct neural system suggested as mediating this effect. However, there has been no clear disambiguation of activity related to decisions themselves from perceptual processing of ambiguity. In a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiment, we contrasted ambiguity, defined as a lack of information about outcome probabilities, to risk, where outcome probabilities are known, or ignorance, where outcomes are completely unknown and unknowable. We modified previously learned pavlovian CS+ stimuli such that they became an ambiguous cue and contrasted evoked brain activity both with an unmodified predictive CS+ (risky cue), and a cue that conveyed no information about outcome probabilities (ignorance cue). Compared with risk, ambiguous cues elicited activity in posterior inferior frontal gyrus and posterior parietal cortex during outcome anticipation. Furthermore, a similar set of regions was activated when ambiguous cues were compared with ignorance cues. Thus, regions previously shown to be engaged by decisions about ambiguous rewarding outcomes are also engaged by ambiguous outcome prediction in the context of aversive outcomes. Moreover, activation in these regions was seen even when no actual decision is made. Our findings suggest that these regions subserve a general function of contextual analysis when search for hidden information during outcome anticipation is both necessary and meaningful.