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Full-Text Articles in Life Sciences

Ethical Analysis Of Brain Augmentation Through Nanotechnology, Austin Caras, James Dejesus May 2018

Ethical Analysis Of Brain Augmentation Through Nanotechnology, Austin Caras, James Dejesus

Sound Decisions: An Undergraduate Bioethics Journal

The use of nanoparticles for drug delivery and neural cell manipulation may soon allow for organic and electronic brain augmentations. Medical technology being used for cognitive enhancement brings a host of ethical questions related to safety, justice, privacy, and individuality. Issues concerning medical consent and intellectual property will be skewed as neuroscience expands our understanding of the brain, growing our capacity to read and modify it. Socioeconomic strata may realign based on augmentations and employment opportunities may become dependent on specific cognitive enhancements. Long-term effects of unregulated nanoparticle usage could elicit an environmental or human health disaster. The potential …


Metaphors And Mind: An Erp Study Of How The Brain Processes Metaphors, Crystal Poole Jan 2018

Metaphors And Mind: An Erp Study Of How The Brain Processes Metaphors, Crystal Poole

Summer Research

Even though metaphors are frequently used in everyday language, how metaphors are created and comprehended in the brain is not well understood. Metaphors can differ in whether they are conventional (such as “love is war”) or novel (such as “love is a tidal wave”), and an unresolved question is if, and how, novel metaphors might become conventional as they are used. In order to test this question, we will ask participants to respond to literal phrases, conventional metaphors, novel metaphors created by the experimenters, and novel metaphors created by the participants themselves while measuring their brain …


Eeg Experiment Scripting Tool For Novice Programmers, Sarah Walling-Bell Jan 2018

Eeg Experiment Scripting Tool For Novice Programmers, Sarah Walling-Bell

Summer Research

Accessible, portable, and affordable technology has made computing one of the main methodologies in brain and behavioral research. This development presents university neuroscience and psychology departments with a major problem: most of their students have no computer programming experience, and the time intensity of learning a computer programming language is a barrier that prevents them from practicing the computational concepts and algorithmic thinking increasingly at the core of research in these fields. This is the case in the University of Puget Sound (UPS) Electroencephalography (EEG) lab, where students researching how electrical activity in the brain responds to stimuli (e.g. …


A Sociocognitive Perspective Of The Uncanny Valley, Andre Zamani Jan 2018

A Sociocognitive Perspective Of The Uncanny Valley, Andre Zamani

Summer Research

The “uncanny valley” is the effect of being ‘creeped out’ by things that are very close, but not quite, human (e.g., a ventriloquist dummy). Over the past two summers, I found that intranasal administrations of oxytocin, a hormone which affects attention to external social information, decreased participants’ reaction times when assessing uncanny valley stimuli, but did not affect their ratings of eeriness. Furthermore, oxytocin affected participants’ reaction times the most for stimuli rated to be intermediately eerie but altered their visual attention the most during the perception of stimuli rated to be either not eerie or very eerie. From these …