Cognitive Science Commons^™

Exploring Usability In Exercise Interventions: From Conceptualization To Measurement And Application, Anne Inger Mørtvedt

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Exercise interventions hold promise for preventing and treating numerous conditions, diseases, and injuries. However, these interventions will only be effective if they are being used. Unfortunately, uptake and adherence to prescribed exercise and physical activity guidelines are insufficient. Some reasons for this include lack of knowledge, resources, flexibility, and enjoyment. Exercise program developers need to not only consider the effectiveness of the program during the development phase, but also involve end-users and receive feedback on program usability to determine likelihood of uptake and adoption. Usability testing can be used to detect barriers to use and implementation likelihood but has not …

Book Review: Kings, Conquerors, Psychopaths: From Alexander To Hitler To The Corporation, Tim Bakken

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

The book Kings, Conquerors, Psychopaths is a survey of a vast amount of human wrongdoing. It lays bare the motivations of aggressors who wish to subjugate nations or groups of people and corporate executives and government bureaucrats who make discretionary decisions that harm people. Along with cataloging mass killings by despots and soldiers, the book includes stories about Ponzi-schemers and the deaths of automobile drivers and passengers who were killed by vehicle defects known to the manufacturer. The book posits that “[p]owerful, elite forces are trying to force us backward toward a non-democratic state, one where power, wealth, and prerogative …

Depaul Digest

DePaul Magazine

College of Education Professor Jason Goulah fosters hope, happiness and global citizenship through DePaul’s Institute for Daisaku Ikeda Studies in Education. Associate Journalism Professor Jill Hopke shares how to talk about climate change. News briefs from DePaul’s 10 colleges and schools: Occupational Therapy Standardized Patient Program, Financial Planning Certificate program, Business Education in Technology and Analytics Hub, Racial Justice Initiative, Teacher Quality Partnership grant, Intimate Partner Violence and Brain Injury collaboration, School of Music Career Closet, Sports Photojournalism course, DePaul Migration Collaborative’s Solutions Lab, Inclusive Screenwriting courses. New appointments: School of Music Dean John Milbauer, College of Education Dean Jennifer …

Blood-Based Transcriptomic Biomarkers Are Predictive Of Neurodegeneration Rather Than Alzheimer's Disease, Artur Shvetcov, Shannon Thomson, Jessica Spathos, Ann-Na Cho, Heather M Wilkins, Shea J Andrews, Fabien Delerue, Timothy A Couttas, Jasmeen Kaur Issar, Finula Isik, Simranpreet Kaur, Eleanor Drummond, Carol Dobson-Stone, Shantel L Duffy, Natasha M Rogers, Daniel Catchpoole, Wendy A Gold, Russell H Swerdlow, David A Brown, Caitlin A Finney

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a growing global health crisis affecting millions and incurring substantial economic costs. However, clinical diagnosis remains challenging, with misdiagnoses and underdiagnoses being prevalent. There is an increased focus on putative, blood-based biomarkers that may be useful for the diagnosis as well as early detection of AD. In the present study, we used an unbiased combination of machine learning and functional network analyses to identify blood gene biomarker candidates in AD. Using supervised machine learning, we also determined whether these candidates were indeed unique to AD or whether they were indicative of other neurodegenerative diseases, such as …

Sex Differences In Stress Reactivity, Brain Morphology, And Oxytocin In The Hypothalamus Of The Gray Short-Tailed Opossum (Monodelphis Domestica), Esperanza I. Zacarias, Daniela Rodriguez, Alexandra Chalons, Sasawan Heingraj, Nicole Altamirano, Joseph Rafac, John L. Vandeberg, Mario Gil

Research Colloquium

Understanding the effects of stress on behavior and cognition is important due to its impact on mental health and wellbeing (Schneiderman et al. 2005). Translational animal research can contribute to the development of new treatments that can improve therapeutic outcomes and our understanding of the neurobiology of stress. In the present study, we complement behavioral stress reactivity with immunohistochemical localization of oxytocin in the hypothalamus, a neuropeptide that regulates stress (Neumann & Slattery, 2016). Oxytocin has potential therapeutic use for mental health disorders (Neumann & Slattery, 2016), and the effects of oxytocin seem to be sexually dimorphic (Love, 2018). Using …

Understanding The Resources, Barriers, Facilitators And Interests About Aging And Dementia Research Of Community Members From The Rio Grande Valley, Karla Daniela Lopez Lorenzo, Rosa V. Pirela Mavarez, Gabriela Osuna, Kendra Stine, Nathalie Chacon, Noe Garza, Gladys E. Maestre

Research Symposium

Background: One of ten people aged 65 develops Alzheimer’s Disease and it is one of the sixth-leading cause of death in the United States. The Rio Grande Valley (RGV) is mostly constituted by Hispanic/Latinos (93%), a population that has a 1.5X increased risk of AD onset. Nevertheless, there are not enough resources to support people living with dementia and their care partners. This study will leverage research efforts deployed by the RGV Alzheimer’s Disease Resource Center for Minority Aging Research to understand the social representations about the resources, barriers, facilitators, and interests of the RGV community about dementia and Alzheimer’s …

Attenuated Typicality Effect In Category-Based Inferences: Implications For Autism Spectrum Disorder, Janani Rajagopalan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Individuals diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) often encounter challenges in assimilating atypical exemplars into their categorical prototypes, a cognitive hurdle that can impact their interpretative and integrative capacities. Addressing this problem, the present research sought to develop a robust methodological approach to reduce the effect of this disparity. We examined the elements embedded within the category's internal structure, with the intention of experimentally attenuating the pronounced typicality effect, which is often exaggerated in ASD.

Across four experiments, the thesis investigated the cognitive and neural underpinnings that shape the access to the typicality gradient intrinsic to a category's structure. The …

The Effects Of Equine-Assisted Activities On Execution Function In Children Aged 7–8 Years: A Randomized Controlled Trial, Xiaodong Cheng, Kexin Zhen, Yongzhao Fan, Qian Tang, Hao Wu

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

BACKGROUND: This study examines the effects of equine-assisted activity (EAA) training on executive functioning (EF) (inhibitory control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility) in children aged 7-8 years.

METHODS: Twenty-Four healthy children aged 7-8 years with a 1:1 ratio of boys to girls were randomly divided into EAA group (EAAG) or control group (CG). The subjects in EAAG were trained for 12 weeks, and CG participated in normal daily activities. All subjects conducted the Flanker, 1-Back, and More-odd shifting tasks at rest and recorded the average reaction times (RTs) and accuracy data of each task.

RESULTS: After 12 weeks of EAA …

Voluntary Action And Conscious Intention, Jake Gavenas

Computational and Data Sciences (PhD) Dissertations

Traditional experimental methodology in neuroscience involves comparing responses to different stimuli to make inferences about the human brain. However, human volition entails making decisions and acting in a manner that is underdetermined by the external environment. Investigations of the neuronal basis of volition have led to new controversies regarding the existence of free will, and offer potential directions for medical treatments of disorders such as addiction, akinetic mutism, and locked-in syndrome. However, because volition experiments leave aspects of responses “up to” participants, neuroscientists must utilize computational techniques such as modeling, simulation, and advanced analyses to progress our understanding of human …

Weakly Supervised Spatial Relation Extraction From Radiology Reports, Surabhi Datta, Kirk Roberts

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

OBJECTIVE: Weak supervision holds significant promise to improve clinical natural language processing by leveraging domain resources and expertise instead of large manually annotated datasets alone. Here, our objective is to evaluate a weak supervision approach to extract spatial information from radiology reports.

MATERIALS AND METHODS: Our weak supervision approach is based on data programming that uses rules (or labeling functions) relying on domain-specific dictionaries and radiology language characteristics to generate weak labels. The labels correspond to different spatial relations that are critical to understanding radiology reports. These weak labels are then used to fine-tune a pretrained Bidirectional Encoder Representations from …

Using Neural Signals To Investigate Athlete Burnout, Mathew R. Hammerstrom, Thomas D. Ferguson, Hendrik L. Pepler, Anthony Pluta, Gordon Binsted, Olave Krigolson

Journal for Sports Neuroscience

Objective: In the present study, we examined the relationships between athlete burnout, brain function, and self-assessment of performance, and how these relationships can be quantified using mobile electroencephalography (mEEG). Specifically, we performed this study to determine whether mEEG can be utilized as an objective measure of athlete burnout. In addition, we sought to determine whether there was any relationship between athlete burnout and athlete self-assessment of performance while controlling for our neural results.

Methods: We tested these relationships in a sample of high-performance athletes – whereby we had athletes complete an mEEG assessment and also had the athletes complete a …

Effects Of Daylight On College Students’ Physical And Mental Well-Being, Sathya Thenappan

Quantitative Social Science Undergraduate Senior Theses

While existing literature predominantly deals with the impact of daylight on adults in general and more specifically at the workplace, less is known about its impact on the college student demographic and daylight exposure levels at college residences. Given its considerable impact on both the physical and mental well-being of individuals, daylight has been used in the treatment of an assortment of diseases from seasonal affective disorder to depression. With college students constituting the majority of today’s people who suffer from mental health issues in society, uncovering the link between daylight exposure and its impact on the physical and mental …

Inferring Personalized Treatment Effect Of Antihypertensives On Alzheimer's Disease Using Deep Learning, Pulakesh Upadhyaya, Yaobin Ling, Luyao Chen, Yejin Kim, Xiaoqian Jiang

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is one of the leading causes of death in the United States, especially among the elderly. Recent studies have shown how hypertension is related to cognitive decline in elderly patients, which in turn leads to increased mortality as well as morbidity. There have been various studies that have looked at the effect of antihypertensive drugs in reducing cognitive decline, and their results have proved inconclusive. However, most of these studies assume the treatment effect is similar for all patients, thus considering only the average treatment effects of antihypertensive drugs. In this paper, we assume that the effect …

Predicting The Risk Of Alzheimer's Disease And Related Dementia In Patients With Mild Cognitive Impairment Using A Semi-Competing Risk Approach, Zhaoyi Chen, Yuchen Yang, Dazheng Zhang, Jingchuan Guo, Yi Guo, Xia Hu, Yong Chen, Jiang Bian

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Alzheimer's disease (AD) and AD-related dementias (AD/ADRD) are a group of progressive neurodegenerative diseases. The progression of AD can be conceptualized as a continuum in which patients progress from normal cognition to preclinical AD (i.e., no symptoms but biological changes in the brain) to mild cognitive impairment (MCI) due to AD (i.e., mild symptoms but not interfere with daily activities), followed by increasing severity of dementia due to AD. Early detection and prediction models for the transition of MCI to AD/ADRD are needed, and efforts have been made to build predictions of MCI conversion to AD/ADRD. However, most existing studies …

Constraining The Binding Problem Using Maps, Zhixian Han, Anne Sereno

MODVIS Workshop

We constrained the binding problem by creating maps of different attributes. We compared the performance of different models with different maps in our current study. Our preliminary results showed that the performance of the model is the highest when location maps were used. These results suggest that the optimal way to constrain the binding problem is to create location maps of different attributes.

Eco-Interoception: What Plants, Fungi And Protista Have Taught My Body, Sara Riley Dotterer

Art Theses and Dissertations

To me, ecology is the relational, full-body awareness that I am made up of and deeply connected to everything around me; and for better or worse, this is reciprocal. I form ecotones, an ecological transitional zone between two ecosystems, with the world around me. I use this ecotonal lens to blur binaries and dissolve boundaries between me and the world “outside my body.” During my Masters of Fine Arts at Southern Methodist University, I have continuously explored and represented the lives of various more-than-human species outside of my body, including plants, fungi and protista through an ecotonal lens. Although these …

Genetic Implications Of Language Acquisition, Marissa Renee Ciccarini

Honors Scholar Theses

The argument about whether language acquisition is "nature" or "nurture" has been long debated. Linguists have concluded that it requires the two, but how much does language acquisition rely on nature? Children show the capacity to learn languages quickly and without much effort. While research suggests that infants absorb many visual and verbal cues in their environment, biological structures are the underlying component of how this knowledge is gathered and organized. The genetics that code for specific neurophysiological pathways affect how people interact with their environment and where information is stored, forming the basis for these biological structures. Genetic research …

Music & Synesthesia: An Exploration Of Synesthesia And Its Relation To Musical Perception, Raquel S. Johnson

Pacific Undergraduate Research and Creativity Conference (PURCC)

This research investigates synesthesia and its impact on musical perception. Synesthesia is the multimodal sensory phenomenon in which the stimulation of one sensory modality generates the experience of a second, otherwise unrelated sense. Discussed topics include: a description of synesthesia and its neurophysiological and perceptual characteristics, the historical conceptualization and documentation of synesthesia beginning with the ancient Greeks, and present-day scientific inquiry. This research explores three varying types of auditory synesthesia - chromesthesia (sound-to-color synesthesia), auditory-tactile synesthesia, and sound-gustatory/sound-olfactory synesthesia - and their multimodal sensory characteristics in relation to music. Prominent neurophysiological hypotheses regarding the existence of synesthesia are examined, …

Genetic Loci Of Beta-Aminoisobutyric Acid Are Associated With Aging-Related Mild Cognitive Impairment, Einat Granot-Hershkovitz, Brian Spitzer, Yunju Yang, Wassim Tarraf, Bing Yu, Eric Boerwinkle, Myriam Fornage, Thomas H Mosley, Charles Decarli, Bruce S Kristal, Hector M González, Tamar Sofer

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

We studied the genetic associations of a previously developed Metabolomic Risk Score (MRS) for Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) and beta-aminoisobutyric acid metabolite (BAIBA)-the metabolite highlighted by results from a genome-wide association study (GWAS) of the MCI-MRS, and assessed their association with MCI in datasets of diverse race/ethnicities. We first performed a GWAS for the MCI-MRS and BAIBA, in Hispanic/Latino adults (n = 3890) from the Hispanic Community Health Study/Study of Latinos (HCHS/SOL). We identified ten independent genome-wide significant (p value <5 × 10-8) variants associated with MCI-MRS or BAIBA. Variants associated with the MCI-MRS are located in the Alanine-Glyoxylate Aminotransferase 2 (AGXT2 gene), which is known to be associated with BAIBA metabolism. Variants associated with BAIBA are located in the AGXT2 gene and in the SLC6A13 gene. Next, we tested the variants' association with MCI in independent datasets of n = 3178 HCHS/SOL older individuals, n = 3775 European Americans, and n = 1032 African Americans from the Atherosclerosis Risk In Communities (ARIC) study. Variants were considered associated with MCI if their p value <0.05 in the meta-analysis of the three datasets and their direction of association was consistent with expectation. Rs16899972 and rs37369 from the AGXT2 region were associated with MCI. Mediation analysis supported the mediation effect of BAIBA between the two genetic variants and MCI (p value = 0.004 for causal mediated effect). In summary, genetic variants in the AGXT2 region are associated with MCI in Hispanic/Latino, African, and European American populations in the USA, and their effect is likely mediated by changes in BAIBA levels.

Resolution Of Cisplatin-Induced Fatigue Does Not Require Endogenous Interleukin-10 In Male Miceb, Kiersten Scott, Nabila Boukelmoune, Cullen Taniguchi, A Phillip West, Cobi J Heijnen, Robert Dantzer

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Based on previous results showing a pivotal role of endogenous interleukin-10 (IL-10) in the recovery from cisplatin-induced peripheral neuropathy, the present experiments were carried out to determine whether this cytokine plays any role in the recovery from cisplatin-induced fatigue in male mice. Fatigue was measured by decreased voluntary wheel running in mice trained to run in a wheel in response to cisplatin. Mice were treated with a monoclonal neutralizing antibody (IL-10na) administered intranasally during the recovery period to neutralize endogenous IL-10. In the first experiment, mice were treated with cisplatin (2.83 mg/kg/day) for five days and IL-10na (12 μg/day for …

Increased Risk Of Dementia In Patients With Atopic Dermatitis: A Nationwide Population-Based Cohort Study, Yu Ri Woo, Minah Cho, Kyung Do Han, Sang Hyun Cho, Ji Hyun Lee

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Atopic dermatitis (AD) is a chronic inflammatory skin disorder with bimodal incidence peaks in early childhood and middle-aged and older adults. Few studies have focused on the risk of dementia in AD. The aims of this study were to analyse the incidence, and risk factors for dementia in patients with AD. This nationwide population-based retrospective cohort study enrolled 38,391 adults ≥ 40 years of age with AD and 2,643,602 controls without AD from the Korean National Health Insurance System (NHIS) database from 2009 to 2016. The cumulative incidence probability of all-cause dementia, Alzheimer's disease, or vascular dementia at 8 years …

From Animal To Plant Sentience: Is There Credible Evidence?, Leonard Dung

Animal Sentience

Segundo-Ortin & Calvo argue that plants have a surprisingly varied and complex behavioral repertoire. Which of these behavioral capacities are credible indicators of sentience? If we use the standards of evidence common in discussions of animal sentience, the behavioral capacities reviewed are insufficient evidence of sentience. Even if some putative indicators of animal sentience are present in plants, it is not clear whether what we should conclude is that plants are sentient or that those indicators are inadequate.

A Quieter Ocean: Experimentally Derived Differences In Attentive Responses Of Tursiops Truncatus To Anthropogenic Noise Playbacks Before And During The Covid-19-Related Anthropause, Paige E. Stevens, Veda Allen, Jason N. Bruck

Faculty Publications

The effects of anthropogenic noise continue to threaten marine fauna, yet the impacts of human-produced sound on the broad aspects of cognition in marine mammals remain relatively understudied. The shutdown of non-essential activities due to the COVID-19-related anthropause created an opportunity to determine if reducing levels of oceanic anthropogenic noise on cetaceans affected processes of sensitization and habituation for common human-made sounds in an experimental setting. Dolphins at Dolphin Quest Bermuda were presented with three noises related to human activities (cruise ship, personal watercraft, and Navy low-frequency active sonar) both in 2018 and again during the anthropause in 2021 via …

A Novel Digital Digit-Symbol Substitution Test Measuring Processing Speed In Adults At Risk For Alzheimer Disease: Validation Study, Anthony Campitelli, Sally Paulson, Josh L. Gills, Megan D. Jones, Erica N. Madero, Jennifer Myers, Jordan M. Glenn, Michelle Gray

Health, Human Performance and Recreation Faculty Publications and Presentations

Background: Assessing cognitive constructs affected by Alzheimer disease, such as processing speed (PS), is important to screen for potential disease and allow for early detection. Digital PS assessments have been developed to provide widespread, efficient cognitive testing, but all have been validated only based on the correlation between test scores. Best statistical practices dictate that concurrent validity should be assessed for agreement or equivalence rather than using correlation alone.

Objective: This study aimed to assess the concurrent validity of a novel digital PS assessment against a gold-standard measure of PS.

Methods: Adults aged 45-75 years (n=191) participated in this study. …

Parental Instincts: The Neurological And Biological Factors Associated With Parenthood, Jared Reeder

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The following project involves a systematic review of the scientific literature on neural and biological changes of mothers and fathers in parenthood. Until very recently, little scientific research was devoted to studying how bearing children affects a man or woman’s long-term biology. Over the last twenty years, studies of neuroplastic changes in new mothers show specific neural mechanisms responsible for altering the behaviors of mothers during and after pregnancy. These changes in neuroplasticity alter behavior in such a way that led to mothers requiring less sleep and being more prone to hearing the cries of their children. In addition to …

1-Back Matching And Mismatching By Pigeons, Thomas Zentall

Psychology Research Data

No abstract provided.

Effects Of Social Context On Salivary Cortisol And Attention In Tufted Capuchins (Cebus [Sapajus] Apella), Andrew Desana

Master’s Theses

Social context alters cognitive performance, but the mechanisms for this remain unclear. One possibility is that stressors associated with social contexts mediate changes in cognitive performance by influencing attention. We conducted two experiments to investigate how social context affects performance on an attention task in capuchin monkeys (Cebus [Sapajus] apella). We additionally validated and measured physiological stress through salivary cortisol. In experiment one, capuchins were exposed to three conditions where they were either isolated or paired with an affiliative or agonistic social partner separated by a barrier. In experiment two, subjects received affiliative and agonistic conditions without barriers to allow …

A Picture Worth A Thousand Words: Factors Influencing Disability Accommodations, Alicia E. Martin

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

Because not all disabilities look the same it is difficult to label a person with disabilities just by looking at them. Given that our knowledge, attitudes, and perceptions impact how we interpret our world and our willingness to act, people, including professors, may be biased toward providing accommodations for those with easily recognizable disabilities and biased against those with non-recognizable disabilities, and this may impact the disabled person’s ability to learn. This thesis aims to address whether professors’ disability-related attitudes, perceptions of accommodation reasonableness, and willingness to provide accommodations differ when the disability is recognizable (student is pictured in a …

Investigating The Impact Of Dividing Attention On Auditory And Visual Object Memory, Sharica Lee, Alexa Salomon, Laura L.S. Werner, Kevin D. Mohawk, Maggie Mcmullin

Undergraduate Research Symposium Posters

Recently, we found that dividing attention reduced recollection and familiarity for visual objects, but a different pattern emerged for auditory object memory: auditory object recollection was not affected by dividing attention. This could be attributable to differing levels of baseline performance with visual memory far exceeding auditory memory. Thus, we attempted to equate baseline performance in both modalities in order to adequately investigate the previous findings.

Consistency Of Efficacy Results Across Various Clinical Measures And Statistical Methods In The Lecanemab Phase 2 Trial Of Early Alzheimer’S Disease, Shobha Dhadda, Michio Kanekiyo, David Li, Chad J Swanson, Michael Irizarry, Scott Berry, Lynn D Kramer, Donald A Berry

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

BACKGROUND: Lecanemab (BAN2401) is a humanized IgG1 monoclonal antibody that preferentially targets soluble aggregated Aβ species (protofibrils) with activity at insoluble fibrils and slowed clinical decline in an 18-month phase 2 proof-of-concept study (Study 201; ClinicalTrials.gov NCT01767311) in 856 subjects with early Alzheimer's disease (AD). In this trial, subjects were randomized to five lecanemab dose regimens or placebo. The primary efficacy endpoint was change from baseline in the Alzheimer's Disease Composite Score (ADCOMS) at 12 months with Bayesian analyses. The key secondary endpoints were ADCOMS at 18 months and Clinical Dementia Rating-Sum-of-Boxes (CDR-SB) and Alzheimer's Disease Assessment Scale-Cognitive Subscale (ADAS-Cog14) …