Life Sciences Commons^™

The Temporal Nature Of The Acute Stress Response And Its Impact On Explicit Learning, Steven B. Hutchinson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Acute stress is commonly experienced by many throughout their lives. Given the demanding lifestyle of many career paths, it's important to gauge the influence of these stressors upon cognitive performance. The present dissertation focus' upon explicit learning in attempts to explore one avenue of the stress-cognition relationship. The Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) was used as a lab stressor for Experiments 1 and 2, in which participants are asked to give a speech and complete a difficult math task in front of 2 evaluators trained to monitor non-verbal behavior. Experiment 1 investigates the dynamic stress response during the minutes following …

Exploring And Training Spatial Reasoning Via Eye Movements: Implications On Performance, Victoria A. Roach

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation sought to determine if eye movements could serve as an indicator of success in spatial reasoning, and if eye movements associated with successful completion could be applied to strategically improve spatial reasoning.

Using the line images of Shepard and Metzler, an electronic test of mental rotations ability (EMRT) was designed. Two versions of the test were created, allowing for both a timed (6 seconds per question) and untimed testing environment. Four experiments were designed and completed to relate mental rotation ability (MRA) scores from the EMRT, to patterns in chrononumeric and visual salience data. In each experiment, participants …

Disentangling Embodied Cognition: An Examination Of The State, Problems, And Possibilities Of Embodied Cognition, Cody Cash

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Embodied cognition has received a fair amount of attention in philosophical, neuroscientific, and robotic research during the past several decades, yet the precise nature of its goals, methods, and claims are unclear. This dissertation will ascertain and examine the primary themes in the field of embodied cognition as well as why, and if, they offer significant challenges to traditional cognitive science models. Though many theories believe they are providing accounts that should replace traditional models, to do so they will have to overcome the very difficult challenge of arguing that mental content and capabilities derived from sensorimotor activity can continue …

Seasonality Of The Stress Response In House Sparrows (Passer Domesticus)., Michael R. Hasstedt

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Seasonal changes in plasma corticosterone (CORT) levels indicate that birds modify their stress response through the year. Although this has been well documented, the method by which birds achieve this seasonality is not well understood. In this study I used house sparrows to determine if changes in glucocorticoid receptor (GR) immunoreactivity in several stress-related brain nuclei showed seasonal variation. The house sparrowsshowed seasonal variation in their stress response with baseline CORT levels being highest during the breeding season and lowest during winter. There was also significant change in plasma CORT post-dexamethasone during breeding, but not during other times of the …

Behavioral And Neural Mechanisms Of Impulsive Choice, Jesse Mcclure

Doctoral Dissertations

Impulsive choice is defined as the preference for a small immediate reward over a larger delayed reward. Individual variablity in impulsive choice correlates with many socially relevant behaviors. Although forms of impulsive choice have been studied in both behavioral ecology and psychology, the exchange of knowledge between these fields is just beginning. Drawing from both of these fields will improve our research methods allowing for a more detailed understanding of this complex behavior. Existing tasks to measure impulsive choice conflate the delay and quantity of the reward. To address this, I have drawn from foraging research to establish a method …

Laminar Fmri In Auditory Cortex At 7t, Jacob Jl Matthews

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Auditory cortex is involved in the perception, attention, memory and imagery of sounds. Neuroimaging has been a rich source of information on which cortical areas are recruited for different tasks. However, a more detailed understanding has been confined to animal studies using invasive imaging modalities, and high-resolution functional descriptions of auditory cortex, including columnar/laminar specific activity, topographical organization within layers, and the way these representations transfer between processing structures remain poorly understood in humans. We present 7T fMRI as a non-invasive tool for high-resolution functional imaging of human auditory cortex on the laminar scale. We describe MATLAB tools for optimizing …

The Neuroscience Of Attachment Theory, Sarah M. Leitner

Sarah M Leitner

This presentation summarizes the latest findings from Cognitive Neuroscience as pertains to Attachment theory, with an emphasis on the literature from 2012 to 2014. It then explores the linkages in the neuroscience literature between attachment theory and mentalization, particularly in the areas of cognitive and emotional mentalization. Implications of the findings are considered, with an emphasis on the application of the findings for emotional regulation in the life of the counselor as well as for psychological and spiritual intervention in the lives of the counselee.

Determining Attention Deficits In Mouse Models Of Alzheimer’S Disease Using Touchscreen Systems, Talal Masood

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Behavioural testing in mouse models of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) suffers from lack of standardization and reproducibility issues between laboratories. In order to solve this, a touchscreen system has been developed for mice based on the CANTAB. There are several cognitive dysfunctions that occur due to AD, including deficits in attention that can be tested using the touchscreens. In this study, we tested two mouse models of familial AD (5xFAD and 3xTG) with mutations that lead to an accelerated rate of amyloidosis. Both male and female mice were tested at two separate locations in order to test for the reproducibility of …

One Giant Leap For Categorizers: One Small Step For Categorization Theory, David J. Smith, Shawn W. Ell

Psychology Faculty Scholarship

We explore humans’ rule-based category learning using analytic approaches that highlight their psychological transitions during learning. These approaches confirm that humans show qualitatively sudden psychological transitions during rule learning. These transitions contribute to the theoretical literature contrasting single vs. multiple category-learning systems, because they seem to reveal a distinctive learning process of explicit rule discovery. A complete psychology of categorization must describe this learning process, too. Yet extensive formal-modeling analyses confirm that a wide range of current (gradient-descent) models cannot reproduce these transitions, including influential rule-based models (e.g., COVIS) and exemplar models (e.g., ALCOVE). It is an important theoretical conclusion …

Estrogen-Sensitive Learning Is Not Affected By Combination Ethinyl Estradiol And Levonorgestrel Oral Contraceptive Use, Darlene F. Ficco

Doctoral Dissertations

Two studies were conducted to explore the cognitive effects of combination ethinyl estradiol and levonorgestrel contraceptive use during late adolescence and young adulthood. Three groups of females, naturally cycling, active pill phase, and hormone-free interval phase, were tested on a battery of estrogen-sensitive, i.e., place learning and word generation, and estrogen-insensitive, i.e., map drawing, mental rotation, digit span, story recall, and object recall, tasks. Study 2 was conducted as a means to replicate the findings observed in Study 1 and to manipulate task difficulty and sensitivity. Two measures of mood were administered, and salivary estradiol levels at time of testing …

Duration Estimates Within A Modality Are Integrated Sub-Optimally, Ming Bo Cai, David M. Eagleman

Faculty Publications

Perceived duration can be influenced by various properties of sensory stimuli. For example, visual stimuli of higher temporal frequency are perceived to last longer than those of lower temporal frequency. How does the brain form a representation of duration when each of two simultaneously presented stimuli influences perceived duration in different way? To answer this question, we investigated the perceived duration of a pair of dynamic visual stimuli of different temporal frequencies in comparison to that of a single visual stimulus of either low or high temporal frequency. We found that the duration representation of simultaneously occurring visual stimuli is …

Concussion Awareness And Educational Outreach Through A Website And Mobile Application, Daniel J. Brogan

Neuroscience Summer Fellows

In recent years concussions have become a more apparent problem in youth and adolescent sports. 1 in 5 high school students will sustain a concussion during the season. Due to medical and scientific advances, the diagnosis of concussions is becoming much simpler with key markers that are signs for an injury. Returning to play too soon before an athlete is fully recovered increases the likelihood that serious and irreversible neurological deficits can occur. Symptoms for concussions are necessary to track in order for an athlete to properly report their recovery to a physician. Doctors primarily rely on a patient’s report …

Associations Between Anxiety And Attention In Laboratory-Housed Rhesus Macaques (Macaca Mulatta), Lauren E. Hobbs

Masters Theses

Previous studies completed with humans have revealed insight into the effects of anxiety on attention tasks such the dot-probe task, but there is little information about such effects on non-human primates. This study aimed to assess whether anxiety or anxious behaviors would impact rhesus macaque performance on a three stimuli paradigm similar to the dot-probe task. Utilizing images of conspecifics (strong threat, mild threat, and neutral), eight monkeys were video recorded completing a task that required them to slide two doors, which held these images, to the side to obtain a treat. We hypothesized that behavioral phenotype (high or low …

Contribution Of The Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex To Attentional And Mnemonic Processes In Visual Search, Brandon Belbeck

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

A key characteristic of selective visual attention is that it may be deployed on the basis of our knowledge or goals of the task at hand. Here, we used cryogenic deactivation to investigate the contribution of the dorsolateral PFC to cognitive flexibility and working memory, as well as their relation to the deployment of attention. Macaque monkeys performed visual search tasks requiring them to foveate a target in an array of stimuli. These included a feature search, a constant-target conjunction search, a variable-target search and variable-target with delay search task, with each being more cognitively demanding than the last. Bilateral …

Senile Dementia From Neuroscientific And Islamic Perspectives, Mohd Amzari Tumiran

Mohd Amzari Tumiran

Diseases involving the nervous system drastically change lives of victims and commonly increase dependency on others. This paper focuses on Senile Dementia (SD) from both the neuroscientific and Islamic perspectives, with special emphasis on the integration of ideas between the two different disciplines. This would enable effective implementation of strategies to address issues involving this disease across different cultures, especially among the world-wide Muslim communities. In addition, certain incongruence ideas on similar issues can be understood better. The former perspective is molded according to conventional modern science while the latter on the analysis of various texts including the holy Qur’an, …

Spatiotemporal Fluctuations Of Olfactory Stimuli And Its Detection By An Optical Method, Mitu Chandra Acharjee

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Olfactory processing in the mammalian brain is a highly dynamic process, yet most of the olfaction experiments have been studied primarily with static stimuli. Odors in the natural environment are transported by turbulent flow of air or water. Natural odorants have fluctuations in concentration and it changes rapidly with time. These rapid fluctuations may pose some challenges to identifying an odor; on the other hand, the variation itself may provide important clues about the odor source. The goal of this thesis project was to create a similar odorant environment like the rapid odor fluctuations encountered in nature – to meet …

Probabilistic Atlases For Face And Biological Motion Perception: An Analysis Of Their Reliability And Overlap, Andrew Engell

Andrew Engell

Neuroimaging research has identified several category-selective regions in visual cortex that respond most strongly when viewing an exemplar image from a preferred category, such as faces. Recent studies, however, have suggested a more complex pattern of activation that has been heretofore unrecognized, e.g., the presence of additional patches of activation to faces beyond the well-studied fusiform face area, and the activation of ostensible face selective regions by animate motion of non-biological forms. Here, we characterize the spatial pattern of brain activity evoked by viewing faces or biological motion in large fMRI samples (N > 120). We create probabilistic atlases for both …

Common Neural Mechanisms For The Evaluation Of Facial Trustworthiness And Emotional Expressions As Revealed By Behavioral Adaptation, Andrew Engell

Andrew Engell

People rapidly and automatically evaluate faces along many social dimensions. Here,we focus on judgments of trustworthiness, which approximate basic valence evaluation of faces, and test whether these judgments are an overgeneralization of the perception of emotional expressions. We used a behavioral adaptation paradigm to investigate whether the previously noted perceptual similarities between trustworthiness and emotional expressions of anger and happiness extend to their underlying neural representations. We found that adapting to angry or happy facial expressions causes trustworthiness evaluations of subsequently rated neutral faces to increase or decrease, respectively. Further, we found no such modulation of trustworthiness evaluations after participants …

Differential Activation Of Frontoparietal Attention Networks By Social And Symbolic Spatial Cues, Andrew Engell

Andrew Engell

Perception of both gaze-direction and symbolic directional cues (e.g. arrows) orient an observer’s attention toward the indicated location. It is unclear, however, whether these similar behavioral effects are examples of the same attentional phenomenon and, therefore, subserved by the same neural substrate. It has been proposed that gaze, given its evolutionary significance, constitutes a ‘special’ category of spatial cue. As such, it is predicted that the neural systems supporting spatial reorienting will be different for gaze than for non-biological symbols. We tested this prediction using functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure the brain’s response during target localization in which laterally …

The Fmri Bold Signal Tracks Electrophysiological Spectral Perturbations, Not Event-Related Potentials., Andrew Engell

Andrew Engell

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG) are primary tools of the psychological neurosciences. It is therefore important to understand the relationship between hemodynamic and electrophysiological responses. An early study by Huettel and colleagues found that the coupling of fMRI blood-oxygen-level-dependent signal (BOLD) and subdurally-recorded signal-averaged event-related potentials (ERPs) was not consistent across brain regions. Instead, a growing body of evidence now indicates that hemodynamic changes measured by fMRI reflect non-phase-locked changes in high frequency power rather than the phase-locked ERP. Here, we revisit the data from Huettel and colleagues and measure event-related spectral perturbations (ERSPs) to examine the …

Face, Eye, And Body Selective Responses In Fusiform Gyrus And Adjacent Cortex: An Intracranial Eeg Study., Andrew D. Engell, Gregory Mccarthy

Andrew D. Engell

unctional MRI (fMRI) studies have investigated the degree to which processing of whole faces, face-parts, and bodies are differentially localized within the fusiform gyrus and adjacent ventral occipitotemporal cortex. While some studies have emphasized the spatial differentiation of processing into discrete areas, others have emphasized the overlap of processing and the importance of distributed patterns of activity. Intracranial EEG (iEEG) recorded from subdural electrodes provides excellent temporal and spatial resolution of local neural activity, and thus provides an alternative method to fMRI for studying differences and commonalities in face and body processing. In this study we recorded iEEG from 12 …

Selective Attention Modulates Face-Specific Induced Gamma Oscillations Recorded From Ventral Occipitotemporal Cortex, Andrew Engell

Andrew Engell

EEG studies from subdural electrodes have demonstrated a face-specific event-related potential (face-N200) recorded from human ventral occipitotemporal cortex. The insensitivity of face-N200 to task manipulations has supported the proposal that face-N200 reflects an initial obligatory response to faces. This result stands in striking contrast to results of neuroimaging studies that have demonstrated strong task sensitivity of the fusiform hemodynamic response evoked by faces, and thus has created a paradox in the face perception literature. We recorded field potentials directly from the cortical surface of 16 patients while they selectively attended to faces or houses. Here we report that face-specific gamma …

Facial Expression And Gaze-Direction In Human Superior Temporal Sulcus, Andrew Engell

Andrew Engell

The perception of facial expression and gaze-direction are important aspects of non-verbal communication. Expressions communicate the internal emotional state of others while gaze-direction offers clues to their attentional focus and future intentions. Cortical regions in the superior temporal sulcus(STS) play a central role in the perception of expression and gaze, but the extent to which the neural representations of these facial gestures are overlapping is unknown. In the current study 12 subjects observed neutral faces with direct-gaze, neutral faces with averted-gaze, or emotionally expressive faces with direct-gaze while we scanned their brains with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), allowing a …

Implicit Trustworthiness Decisions: Automatic Coding Of Face Properties In Human Amygdala, Andrew Engell

Andrew Engell

Deciding whether an unfamiliar person is trustworthy is one of the most important decisions in social environments. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to show that the amygdala is involved in implicit evaluations of trustworthiness of faces, consistent with prior findings. The amygdala response increased as perceived trustworthiness decreased in a task that did not demand person evaluation. More importantly, we tested whether this response is due to an individual’s idiosyncratic perception or to face properties that are perceived as untrustworthy across individuals. The amygdala response was better predicted by consensus ratings of trustworthiness than by an individual’s own judgments. …

A Kinematic Analysis Of Visual And Haptic Contributions To Precision Grasping In A Patient With Visual Form Agnosia And In Normally-Sighted Populations, Robert Whitwell

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Skilled arm and hand movments designed to obtain and manipulate objects (prehension) is one of the defining features of primates. According to the two visual system hypothesis (TVSH) vision can be parsed into two systems: (1) the ventral ‘stream’ of the occipital and inferotemporal cortex which services visual perception and other cognitive functions and (2) the ‘dorsal stream’ of the occipital and posterior parietal cortex which services skilled, goal-directed actions such as prehension. A cornerstone of the TVSH is the ‘perception-action’ dissociation observed in patient DF who suffers from visual form agnosia following bilateral damage to her ventral stream. DF …

Left Posterior Temporal Regions Are Sensitive To Auditory Categorization, Rutvik Desai, E. Liebenthal, E. Waldron, J. Binder

Rutvik Desai

No abstract provided.

Parkinson’S Disease Disrupts Both Automatic And Controlled Processing Of Action Verbs, L. Fernandino, L. Conant, J. Binder, K. Blindauer, B. Hiner, K. Spangler, Rutvik Desai

Rutvik Desai

No abstract provided.

The Neural Career Of Sensory-Motor Metaphors, Rutvik Desai, J. Binder, L. Conant, Q. Mano, M. Seidenberg

Rutvik Desai

No abstract provided.

Fmri Of Past Tense Processing: The Effects Of Phonological Complexity And Task Difficulty, Rutvik Desai, L. Conant, E. Waldron, J. Binder

Rutvik Desai

No abstract provided.

Familiarity Differentially Affects Right Hemisphere Contributions To Processing Metaphors And Literals, V. Lai, Wessel Van Dam, L. Conant, J. Binder, Rutvik Desai

Rutvik Desai

The role of the two hemispheres in processing metaphoric language is controversial. While some studies have reported a special role of the right hemisphere (RH) in processing metaphors, others indicate no difference in laterality relative to literal language. Some studies have found a role of the RH for novel/unfamiliar metaphors, but not conventional/familiar metaphors. It is not clear, however, whether the role of the RH is specific to metaphor novelty, or whether it reflects processing, reinterpretation or reanalysis of novel/unfamiliar language in general. Here we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine the effects of familiarity in both metaphoric …