Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

White Matter Connectome Associations With Reading Functions In Children, Chenglin Lou

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis investigated associations between the white matter connectome and reading in children with a wide range of reading abilities. It is well established that the connectome supports the interplay among brain regions and connections within an integrated system. In this dissertation, I examine the hypothesis that it could therefore represent multiple mapping processes among reading components and further explain variations in reading performance. Such associations between the organization of the connectome and reading skills have not been well explored. This thesis aimed to address this issue by considering both the relationship between connectome measures and standardized reading performance out …

Fraction Magnitude Understanding Across Learning Formats: An Fmri Study, Chloe A. Henry

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Knowledge of fraction magnitudes are an important, but notoriously difficult mathematical concept to master. Behavioural work has begun to explore and compare the instructional tools used for fraction learning. However, how fraction instructional tools are processed in the brain remains an underexplored question. Therefore, in the present thesis, we used functional brain MRI methodology to examine the neural activity of adult participants while completing a fraction verification task using the number line and area model, two common methods of fraction learning. We found that both models commonly recruited fronto-parietal activity, the neural regions typically implicated in number processing. However, we …

Investigating The Roles Of The Dorsal And Ventral Striatum In Humor Comprehension And Appreciation Throughout Health, Aging, And Parkinson’S Disease, Maggie Prenger

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Humor processing is thought to involve two distinct components. The first, humor comprehension, involves detecting and resolving incongruities that are present within a humorous stimulus. This is related to cognitive processes such as ambiguity resolution, response inhibition, working memory, and cognitive flexibility, functions that are mediated in part by the dorsal portion of the striatum (DS). Humor appreciation, on the other hand, refers to the subjective amusement and mirth that one experiences in response to a joke. This is related to reward processing, which implicates the ventral portion of the striatum (VS). Across three separate studies, we investigated the involvement …

Examining The Relationships Between Socio-Cognitive Factors And Neural Synchrony During Movie Watching Across Development, Kathleen M. Lyons

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

While different cognitive abilities mature, the conscious experiences of children likely become richer and more elaborate. A challenge in investigating relationships between cognitive development and real-world experiences is having measures that assess naturalistic processing. Movie watching offers a solution, since following the plot of a film requires cognitive processes that are similar to real-world experiences. When different adults watch the same film, their brain activity begins to align (known as neural synchrony). The strength of this alignment has been shown to reflect the degree to which different individuals are having a similar experience of the movie. While this phenomenon has …

Role Of The Default-Mode Network During Narrative Integration In Major Depressive Disorder, Darren Ri-Sheng Liang

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

How brain activity is synchronized across individuals during narrative comprehension has previously been characterized by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in healthy and patient populations. To our knowledge, there has been limited investigation as to how it is affected by major depressive disorder (MDD). We addressed this issue with fMRI through examination of inter-subject synchronization in the default mode network (DMN), brain structures which have previously been implicated in MDD pathology. Twenty-two patients with MDD and 20 matched control participants listened to Intact versus Scrambled versions of an auditory narrative; these experimental conditions differed in the degree of temporal integration …

Cognitive, Neural, And Educational Contributions To Mathematics Performance: A Closer Look At The Roles Of Numerical And Spatial Skills, Zachary C.K. Hawes

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The principal aims of this thesis were to (1) provide new insights into the cognitive and neural associations between spatial and mathematical abilities, and (2) translate and apply findings from the field of numerical cognition to the teaching and learning of early mathematics.

Study 1 investigated the structure and interrelations amongst cognitive constructs related to numerical, spatial, and executive function (EF) skills and mathematics achievement in 4- to 11-year old children (N=316). Results revealed evidence of highly related, yet separable, cognitive constructs. Together, numerical, spatial, and EF skills explained 84% of the variance in mathematics achievement (controlling for chronological age). …

Pattern Separation In The Ventral Visual Stream, Kayla Ferko

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Pattern separation is a neural computation thought to underlie our ability to form distinct memories of similar events. It involves transforming overlapping inputs into less overlapping outputs. In the ventral visual stream (VVS) there is considerable evidence for hierarchical transformation from feature-based visual representations to conjunctive whole-object representations, with the latter allowing for distinct coding even when objects have significant feature overlap. In the current study, we asked whether this transformation can be understood as pattern separation, and whether pattern separation can be observed even outside the context of classic recognition-memory tasks. To investigate pattern separation in the VVS, we …

The Neural And Cognitive Basis Of Cumulative Lifetime Familiarity Assessment, Devin Duke

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Perirhinal cortex (PrC) has been implicated as a brain region in the medial temporal lobes (MTL) that critically contributes to familiarity-based recognition memory, a process that allows for recognition to occur independently of contextual recollection. Informed by neurophysiological research in non-human primates, fMRI, as well as behavioural work in humans, the current thesis research tests the novel hypothesis that PrC cortex functioning also underlies the ability to assess cumulative lifetime familiarity with object concepts that are characterized by a lifetime of experiences. In Chapter 2, a patient (NB) with a left anterior temporal lobe (ATL) lesion that included PrC as …

The Influence Of Proficiency And Age Of Acquisition On Second Language Processing: An Fmri Study Of Mandarin-English Bilinguals, Emily S. Nichols

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Research investigating the neural correlates of second language (L2) processing has usually studied age of acquisition (AoA) and proficiency separately. Presently, we examined both in parallel, treated as continuous variables. We used fMRI to study neural activity for L2 processing in adult native Mandarin speakers who are L2 English speakers. Behavioral measures of language proficiency and AoA were obtained from subjects prior to performing a picture-word matching task during an fMRI scan. Brain activity during L2 English processing was shown to be independently affected by AoA and proficiency; activity in left superior temporal gyrus and right parahippocampal gyrus was modulated …

Fmri Reveals The Neural Correlates Of Real And Pantomimed Tool Use In Humans, Joseph Umberto Paciocco

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Although functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) can be used to study the neural mechanisms underlying greatly expanded cognitive functions in humans like tool use, surprisingly little fMRI research has been done on actual tool use. In fact, due to technical constraints, most fMRI studies have used pantomimed actions as a proxy for real use. However, human neuropsychology patients who are impaired at pantomiming often improve when handling a tool suggesting potential neural differences. We used fMRI to record brain activation while 13 right-handed participants performed one of two tasks, real or pantomime tool use with one of two tools, a …

Mental Blocks: The Behavioural Effects And Neural Encoding Of Obstacles When Reaching And Grasping, Craig S. Chapman

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The ability to adeptly interact with a cluttered and dynamic world requires that the brain simultaneously encode multiple objects. Theoretical frameworks of selective visuomotor attention provide evidence for parallel encoding (Baldauf & Deubel, 2010; Cisek & Kalaska, 2010; Duncan, 2006) where concurrent object processing results in neural competition. Since the end goal of object representation is usually action, these frameworks argue that the competitive activity is best characterized as the development of visuomotor biases. While some behavioural and neural evidence has been accumulated in favour of this explanation, one of the most striking, yet deceptively common, demonstrations of this capacity …