IBSS-Ex: Exploring Recidivism Through a Tablet-Based Battery to Assess Individual Decision Making

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Scientists long have explored and measured a range of decision-making traits, such as the ability to inhibit impulses or to understand other people's emotions. Researchers have developed, validated, and refined a wide range of neurocognitive assessments, some of which have been used to try to make reasonable predictions of how dangerous prisoners will be in the future. This interdisciplinary research project will build on these previous efforts to test whether a newly developed tablet-based battery of tests can approve capabilities to improve prediction of future dangerousness by identifying and evaluating the relationships among several aspects of decision making and criminal recidivism. The assessment battery is designed to quantify an individual's decision-making profile, even if a user has limited reading proficiency and little to no previous experience with tablet computers. The project will explore a methodology than may be able to better tie details of individual decision making directly to past and future behavior. Although this project will focus on the topic of criminal recidivism, the software to be tested will provide an open-source, validated tool for correlating decision making with a variety of behavioral variables. Project findings will provide a deeper understanding of offenders' deficits, which may yield more rational, evidence-based policies aimed at the prevention and control of crime. The project also will provide education and training opportunities for graduate students and a post-doctoral researcher who are members of groups that are underrepresented in scientific research activities.This project will focus on the core question of whether signatures of individual decision making can help to identify high-volume and high-risk criminal offenders. Past studies have employed a range of techniques, such as psychiatric assessment, behavioral inventories, and brain scanning, which have generally found that offenders have problems with anger, empathy, aggression, impulse-control, and self-management. The project advances efforts to directly measure those traits among offenders by accomplishing three specific aims: (1) finalize development of the battery, (2) validate it against standardized neurocognitive tests, and (3) quantify patterns of criminal recidivism by correlating decision-making metrics with future criminal activity of 300 released probationers. This project is supported through the NSF Interdisciplinary Behavioral and Social Sciences Research (IBSS) competition.