Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Vapourized Cannabis Extract Administration Impairs Memory And Alters Neural Activity In Laboratory Rats, Megan Chladny

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Although people have smoked cannabis for millennia, administration of cannabis by heating the dried plant material or distilled extracts to a temperature just below the combustion point (i.e., vapourization or "vaping") has rapidly increased over the past few years (Javadi-Payder, Cole, and Taffe, 2018; Manwell, Charchoglyan, Brewer, Matthews, Heipel, and Mallet, 2014). Conversely, most of the cannabinoid research using rodent models has used parenteral routes of administration to examine the effects of purified cannabis extracts such as ∆⁹-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), making it difficult to directly compare laboratory research to human drug use. Building on previous studies showing that THC …

The Electrophysiological Correlates Of Text Integration And Direct Vs. Indirect Articles: A Centralized And Lateralized Examination, Deanna C. Hall

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

As we read, we develop mental models of the discourse content called situation models. Situation models are integral to how we keep track of information, and to do so in an ongoing event incoming information needs to be integrated into the model or discarded. The type of information being presented, and its relation to prior data, impacts how that new information is processed. The current research examined discourse passages containing concepts that were either previously mentioned (match), mentioned with a general term (general category), unmentioned in lieu of another concept (mismatch), or completely unmentioned previously (indeterminate), and examined how these …

Spatial Memory And Executive Functioning In The Goto-Kakizaki Rat Model Of Diabetes, Lorielle Dietze

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Type 2 diabetes mellitus is a disease that adversely affects cognitive function in areas extending to memory and executive functioning. The Goto-Kakizaki (GK) rat provides a model of type 2 diabetes that can illustrate the mechanisms by which this disease works. The present study compared hyperglycaemic GK rats and age-matched Wistar rats in the Morris water maze to assess spatial memory, and in a perceptual attentional set-shifting task to assess putative prefrontal-dependent executive functioning. Results showed there was no difference in path length during training trials, however, GK and Wistar rats differed in the path length travelled in the target …

What Makes An Image Memorable? Effects Of Encoding On The Mechanism Of Recognition, Asiya Gul

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Memory is undoubtedly one of the most important processes of human cognition. A long line of research suggests that recognition relies on the assessment of two explicit memory phenomena: familiarity and recollection. Researchers who support the Dual Process Signal Detection (DPSD) model of recognition memory link the FN400 component (a negative ERP deflection peaking around 400 ms at frontal electrodes) with familiarity; however, it is currently unclear whether the FN400 reflects familiarity or implicit memory. Three event-related potentials (ERP) studies were conducted to determine whether implicit memory plays a role in setting up encoding strategies, and how these encoding strategies …

An Examination Of Imagined Contexts: The Unreliability Of Context-Dependent Memory Effects In Recall, Caitlin J. I. Tozios

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

It is generally accepted that the environmental context present during memory encoding serves as an effective cue for recall if reinstated during retrieval. Participants who perform a free recall test in the same context as that during which they learned a set of words, often remember more words than participants who experience a context mismatch from encoding to retrieval. This is referred to as the context-dependent memory effect and forgetting due to a change in context is referred to as context-dependent forgetting. Recent evidence suggests that contexts need not always be physical but can be mentally generated or imagined and …

An Exploration Of The Wheel-Induced Feeding-Suppression, Stephen Benjamin Peckham

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Anorexia nervosa is an enigmatic human condition typified by food-restriction that is often accompanied by extensive exercise. This has been modeled in rats in the wheel-induced feeding-suppression (WIFS) model. In this model, animals are given access to a running-wheel, which induces a volitional drop in food-consumption. Short periods of wheel access have induced a feeding-suppression which is effectively reversed by chlorpromazine administration (Adams et al., 2009). Recent attempts at replicating Adams et al.’s (2009) feeding-suppression have, however, been unsuccessful (Peckham et al., 2013). These attempts raised questions as to whether or not the existing methodology is most effective at suppressing …

Influence Of Planning Resources On Gait Control In Parkinson’S Disease, Frederico P. Faria

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Movement disturbances in individuals with Parkinson’s disease (PD) have been associated with difficulties to plan complex actions. Performance of simple and complex actions overloads resources for individuals with Parkinson’s disease (PD). However, it is unclear if central resources required to plan gait adjustments while walking exacerbate gait disturbances of patients with PD. More specifically, it is unclear how gait impairments, sensory processing, and the dopaminergic system influence the load on processing resources (e.g. cognitive load) during the planning of step modifications. In order to investigate the relative influence of these factors on cognitive load and its impact on gait control, …

Time, Perspectives, Verbs, And Imagining Events, Jeffrey P. Hong

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

During the processing of verbs, readers form internal representations of the events described by those verbs. Two key elements in the construction of event representations are temporal information, given by the verbs that describe the represented events, and the visual perspective from which the events are represented. The current study is composed of two experiments aimed at examining the roles these two factors play in event representation. Specifically, the study aimed to determine how temporal information and visual perspective are represented during event imagination.

Experiment 1 investigated the role of temporal information associated with verbs, given by grammatical aspect (GA) …

A Bittersweet Investigation Of Availability And Nutritive Value As Determinants Of Volitional Sucrose Consumption, Milan D. Valyear

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Rats given ~24 h access to a 4% sucrose solution every 3^rd day (E3DA) consume about 100 g more solution than rats with continuous, everyday access (EDA). Under the same EDA-E3DA conditions rats will consume similar amounts of a more concentrated 8 or 16% sucrose solutions (Eikelboom, Hewitt, & Adams, Unpublished). It maybe that with these more concentrated solutions rats hit a satiety limit that prevents a difference between EDA and E3DA consumption from being evident. Experiment 1 was conducted to investigate the effect of adding quinine to 4% and 8% sucrose solutions with the intention of reducing consumption …