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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

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Life Sciences

Dartmouth Scholarship

Series

Cognition

Publication Year

Articles 1 - 5 of 5

Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Enrichment And Training Improve Cognition In Rats With Cortical Malformations, Kyle R. Jenks, Marcella M. Lucas, Ben A. Duffy, Ashlee A. Robbins, Barjor Gimi, Jeremy M. Barry, Rod C. Scott Dec 2013

Enrichment And Training Improve Cognition In Rats With Cortical Malformations, Kyle R. Jenks, Marcella M. Lucas, Ben A. Duffy, Ashlee A. Robbins, Barjor Gimi, Jeremy M. Barry, Rod C. Scott

Dartmouth Scholarship

Children with malformations of cortical development (MCD) frequently have associated cognitive impairments which reduce quality of life. We hypothesized that cognitive deficits associated with MCD can be improved with environmental manipulation or additional training. The E17 methylazoxymethanol acetate (MAM) exposure model bears many anatomical hallmarks seen in human MCDs as well as similar behavioral and cognitive deficits. We divided control and MAM exposed Sprague-Dawley rats into enriched and non-enriched groups and tested performance in the Morris water maze. Another group similarly divided underwent sociability testing and also underwent Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans pre and post enrichment. A third group …


Self-Regulatory Depletion Increases Emotional Reactivity In The Amygdala, Dylan D. Wagner, Todd F. Heatherton Aug 2013

Self-Regulatory Depletion Increases Emotional Reactivity In The Amygdala, Dylan D. Wagner, Todd F. Heatherton

Dartmouth Scholarship

The ability to self-regulate can become impaired when people are required to engage in successive acts of effortful self-control, even when self-control occurs in different domains. Here, we used functional neuroimaging to test whether engaging in effortful inhibition in the cognitive domain would lead to putative dysfunction in the emotional domain. Forty-eight participants viewed images of emotional scenes during functional magnetic resonance imaging in two sessions that were separated by a challenging attention control task that required effortful inhibition (depletion group) or not (control group). Compared to the control group, depleted participants showed increased activity in the left amygdala to …


Implicitly Priming The Social Brain: Failure To Find Neural Effects, Katherine E. Powers, Todd F. Heatherton Feb 2013

Implicitly Priming The Social Brain: Failure To Find Neural Effects, Katherine E. Powers, Todd F. Heatherton

Dartmouth Scholarship

Humans have a fundamental need for social relationships. Rejection from social groups is especially detrimental, rendering the ability to detect threats to social relationships and respond in adaptive ways critical. Indeed, previous research has shown that experiencing social rejection alters the processing of subsequent social cues in a variety of socially affiliative and avoidant ways. Because social perception and cognition occurs spontaneously and automatically, detecting threats to social relationships may occur without conscious awareness or control. Here, we investigated the automaticity of social threat detection by examining how implicit primes affect neural responses to social stimuli. However, despite using a …


Multivoxel Patterns In Face-Sensitive Temporal Regions Reveal An Encoding Schema Based On Detecting Life In A Face, Christine E. Looser, Jyothi S. Guntupalli, Thalia Wheatley Jul 2012

Multivoxel Patterns In Face-Sensitive Temporal Regions Reveal An Encoding Schema Based On Detecting Life In A Face, Christine E. Looser, Jyothi S. Guntupalli, Thalia Wheatley

Dartmouth Scholarship

More than a decade of research has demonstrated that faces evoke prioritized processing in a ‘core face network’ of three brain regions. However, whether these regions prioritize the detection of global facial form (shared by humans and mannequins) or the detection of life in a face has remained unclear. Here, we dissociate form-based and animacy-based encoding of faces by using animate and inanimate faces with human form (humans, mannequins) and dog form (real dogs, toy dogs). We used multivariate pattern analysis of BOLD responses to uncover the representational similarity space for each area in the core face network. Here, we …


Detecting Agency From The Biological Motion Of Veridical Vs Animated Agents, Raymond A. Mar, William M. Kelley, Todd F. Heatherton, C. Neil Macrae May 2007

Detecting Agency From The Biological Motion Of Veridical Vs Animated Agents, Raymond A. Mar, William M. Kelley, Todd F. Heatherton, C. Neil Macrae

Dartmouth Scholarship

The ability to detect agency is fundamental for understanding the social world. Underlying this capacity are neural circuits that respond to patterns of intentional biological motion in the superior temporal sulcus and temporoparietal junction. Here we show that the brain's blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) response to such motion is modulated by the representation of the actor. Dynamic social interactions were portrayed by either live-action agents or computer-animated agents, enacting the exact same patterns of biological motion. Using an event-related design, we found that the BOLD response associated with the perception and interpretation of agency was greater when identical physical …