Neuroscience and Neurobiology Commons^™

Classical Conditioning Of Cognitive States, Arthur Burns

Neuroscience Honors Papers

Classical conditioning has been a fundamental concept and practice throughout the history of psychology. While classical conditioning traditionally seeks to elicit target behaviors in correlation to specific stimuli, we sought to do the same with cognitive states in place of behaviors. Specifically, we wanted to determine the effectiveness of conditioning states of cognitive arousal in human participants in conjunction with cues presented in a designed learning task. We designed a cognitive task specifically for this research, referred to as “the Tone Pitching Task”, which utilized a combination of working memory and mental processing in order to elicit cognitive arousal and …

Rhythm Of The Night: Brain Activity And Performance On A Sustained Attention Task Is Modulated By Circadian Typology And Time Of Day, Carly R. Cooper

Honors Thesis

The human circadian system plays an important role in biological and psychological processes in both health and disease. Circadian typology refers to individual differences in circadian rhythm and is categorized into three general chronotypes: morning, evening, and neither. Research suggests that an individual’s diurnal preference may be associated with differences in cognitive abilities, personality traits, and incidence of psychiatric disorders. In the present study, we utilized a Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART) and an electroencephalogram (EEG) in a desynchrony protocol. Morning-type and evening-type participants completed a SART task on two separate occasions during which brain activity was recorded. This …

An Investigation Of Short-Term Plasticity In Human Motor Cortex, Matthew Alan Gannon

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) produces a transient magnetic field that activates underlying cortical tissue by eliciting an electrical discharge of the neurons in the targeted area. Repetitive TMS (rTMS) uses patterns of repetitive TMS pulses and has been reliably shown to produce changes in the state of cortical excitability outlasting the time of stimulation. One such protocol that has demonstrated states of increased excitability is intermittent theta burst stimulation (iTBS). This method applies high-frequency bursts (50Hz) of pulses every 200 ms in trains of ten bursts. The effects of and differences between rTMS protocols have been investigated since gaining popularity …

Effect Of Prior Trauma Exposure On Alpha Amplitude, Heart Rate, And Self-Reported Negative Affect, Gina L. Denoble

All Master's Theses

This study was conducted to investigate whether the number of traumatic events an individual has previously experienced influences that individual’s physiological and psychological reactions when exposed to a negative affective stimulus followed by a mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) intervention. Twenty-eight participants were placed into intact quasi-experimental groups based on their scores on the Traumatic Life Events Questionnaire (TLEQ). The negative affective stimulus consisted of a series of photos bearing negative affective valence. The photos were selected from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS), and paralleled the areas of trauma exposure evaluated by the TLEQ. All participants were exposed to the …

Experimental-Computational Analysis Of Vigilance Dynamics For Applications In Sleep And Epilepsy, Farid Yaghouby

Theses and Dissertations--Biomedical Engineering

Epilepsy is a neurological disorder characterized by recurrent seizures. Sleep problems can cooccur with epilepsy, and adversely affect seizure diagnosis and treatment. In fact, the relationship between sleep and seizures in individuals with epilepsy is a complex one. Seizures disturb sleep and sleep deprivation aggravates seizures. Antiepileptic drugs may also impair sleep quality at the cost of controlling seizures. In general, particular vigilance states may inhibit or facilitate seizure generation, and changes in vigilance state can affect the predictability of seizures. A clear understanding of sleep-seizure interactions will therefore benefit epilepsy care providers and improve quality of life in patients. …

Biological Motion Processing In Typical Development And In The Autism Spectrum, Aaron Krakowski

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Biological motion (BM) analysis and interpretation is a fundamental process of human neurocognition that has been only minimally explored neurophysiologically. In addition to its importance in understanding the underlying roots and development of social cognition, BM processing is a prime candidate domain for exploring the underlying etiology of social cognitive disorders such as the autism spectrum.

In an initial experiment, typical adults observed BM point-light displays of a human actor (UM) as well as their spatially scrambled counterparts (SM), in both an unattended distractor task as well as an explicit attention task. Results showed a neurophysiological response manifested as three …