Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Providing Low-Fee Psychological Assessments As A Community Service, Christopher E. Overtree

PSC Publications

No abstract provided.

Social Control Of Brain Morphology In A Eusocial Mammal, Geert De Vries, M. M. Holmes, G. J. Rosen, C. L. Jordan, B. D. Goldman, N. G. Forger

Geert De Vries

Social status impacts reproductive behavior in diverse vertebrate species, but little is known about how it affects brain morphology. We explore this in the naked mole-rat, a species with the most rigidly organized reproductive hierarchy among mammals. Naked mole-rats live in large, subterranean colonies where breeding is restricted to a single female and small number of males. All other members of the colony, known as subordinates, are reproductively suppressed. Subordinates can become breeders if removed from the colony and placed with an opposite sex partner, but in nature most individuals never attain reproductive status. We examined the brains of breeding …

Cerebellar Activation During Discrete And Not Continuous Timed Movements: An Fmri Study, Rebecca M. C. Spencer, Timothy Verstynen, Matthew Brett, Richard Ivry

Rebecca M. C. Spencer

Individuals with cerebellar lesions are impaired in the timing of repetitive movements that involve the concatenation of discrete events such as tapping a finger. In contrast, these individuals perform comparably to controls when producing continuous repetitive movements. Based on this, we have proposed that the cerebellum plays a key role in event timing—the representation of the temporal relationship between salient events related to the movement (e.g., flexion onset or contact with a response surface). In the current study, we used fMRI to examine cerebellar activity during discrete and continuous rhythmic movements. Participants produced rhythmic movements with the index finger either …

Permanently Temporary: Roma Refugee Youth Seeking Schooling, Karen N. Binger

Master's Capstone Projects

This study investigates the experiences of education in exile from a small case study of Roma refugee male youths from Kosovo temporarily settled in Macedonia as ‘asylum seekers.’ These refugees are at an overlooked age where they have slipped through the cracks between the post-war, short-term relief and longer-term development efforts in terms of education. Many of the frustrations of this community stem from their difficulties in accessing education, and their uncertain legal limbo or ‘permanently temporary’ situations.

As adolescents, refugees, and Roma, the youth are at a triple jeopardy of marginalization and invisibility. Through conversations with four Roma refugee …

Age-Related Decline Of Sleep-Dependent Consolidation, Rebecca M. C. Spencer, Avin M. Gouw, Richard B. Ivry

Rebecca M. C. Spencer

Sleep-dependent memory consolidation is observed following motor skill learning: Performance improvements are greater over a 12-h period containing sleep relative to an equivalent interval without sleep. Here we examined whether older adults exhibit sleep-dependent consolidation on a sequence learning task. Participants were trained on one of two sequence learning tasks. Performance was assessed after a 12-h break that included sleep and after a 12-h break that did not include sleep. Older and younger adults showed similar degrees of initial learning. However, performance of the older adults did not improve following sleep, providing evidence that sleep-dependent consolidation is diminished with age.

Plasticity In Brain Sexuality Is Revealed By The Rapid Actions Of Steroid Hormones, Luke Remage_Healey, Andrew H. Bass

Luke Remage-Healey

Divergent steroid hormone profiles can shape the development of male versus female neural phenotypes, but whether they also determine differences in the short-term, neurophysiological patterning of behavior is unknown. We now show that steroid hormone-specific modulation of a vocal pattern generator (VPG) diverges between reproductive morphs in a teleost fish. Only type I male midshipman acoustically court females, whereas type II males steal fertilizations from type I males and, like females, generate only agonistic calls. The androgen 11-ketotestosterone (11kT), but not testosterone (T), rapidly (within 5 min) increases type I VPG output. As now shown, T, but not 11kT, rapidly …