Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

The Impact Of Service Dogs On Objective And Perceived Sleep Quality For Veterans With Ptsd, Madhuri Vempati, Elise A. Miller, Sarah C. Leighton, Leanne O. Nieforth, Marguerite O’Haire

Discovery Undergraduate Interdisciplinary Research Internship

One in four post-9/11 veterans (Fulton et al., 2015) have been diagnosed with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), facing sleep disruptions as one of their most common symptoms. Service dogs have become an increasingly popular complementary intervention and anecdotes suggest they may impact sleep for veterans with PTSD. There is a need for empirical investigation into these claims through measurement and analysis of sleep quality.

The purpose of this study was to longitudinally investigate the impact of service dogs on sleep quality through both objective and subjective measures.

Participants in the treatment group (n=92) received a service dog after baseline, while …

A Two-Layer Model Explains Higher-Order Feature Selectivity Of V2 Neurons, Timothy D. Oleskiw, Justin D. Lieber, J. Anthony Movshon, Eero P. Simoncelli

MODVIS Workshop

Neurons in cortical area V2 respond selectively to higher-order visual features, such as the quasi-periodic structure of natural texture. However, a functional account of how V2 neurons build selectivity for complex natural image features from their inputs – V1 neurons locally tuned for orientation and spatial frequency – remains elusive.

We made single-unit recordings in area V2 in two fixating rhesus macaques. We presented stimuli composed of multiple superimposed grating patches that localize contrast energy in space, orientation, and scale. V2 activity is modeled via a two-layer linear-nonlinear network, optimized to use a sparse combination of V1-like outputs to account …