Psychology Commons^™

The Dartmouth Database Of Children’S Faces: Acquisition And Validation Of A New Face Stimulus Set, Kirsten A. Dalrymple, Jesse Gomez, Brad Duchaine

Dartmouth Scholarship

Facial identity and expression play critical roles in our social lives. Faces are therefore frequently used as stimuli in a variety of areas of scientific research. Although several extensive and well-controlled databases of adult faces exist, few databases include children’s faces. Here we present the Dartmouth Database of Children’s Faces, a set of photographs of 40 male and 40 female Caucasian children between 6 and 16 years-of-age. Models posed eight facial expressions and were photographed from five camera angles under two lighting conditions. Models wore black hats and black gowns to minimize extra-facial variables. To validate the images, independent raters …

Randomized Clinical Trial Examining Duration Of Voucher-Based Reinforcement Therapy For Cocaine Abstinence., Kimberly C Kirby, Carolyn M Carpenedo, Karen L Dugosh, Beth J Rosenwasser, Lois A Benishek, Alicia Janik, Rachel Keashen, Elena Bresani, Kenneth Silverman

College of Science & Mathematics Departmental Research

BACKGROUND: This is the first study to systematically manipulate duration of voucher-based reinforcement therapy (VBRT) to see if extending the duration increases abstinence during and following VBRT.

METHODS: We randomized cocaine-dependent methadone-maintained adults to Standard (12 weeks; n=62) or Extended (36 weeks; n=68) VBRT and provided escalating voucher amounts contingent upon urinalysis verification of cocaine abstinence. Urinalysis was scheduled at least every 2 weeks during the 48-week study and more frequently during VBRT (3/week) and 12 weeks of Aftercare (2/week).

RESULTS: Extended VBRT produced longer durations of continuous cocaine abstinence during weeks 1-24 (5.7 vs 2.7 weeks; p=0.003) and proportionally …

Diabetes And Prostate Cancer Screening In Black And White Men, Maureen Sanderson, Jay H. Fowke, Loren Lipworth, Xijing Han, Flora Ukoli, Ann L. Coker, William J. Blot, Margaret K. Hargreaves

CRVAW Faculty Journal Articles

PURPOSE: Prior studies conducted primarily among white men find a reduced risk of prostate cancer associated with time since developing diabetes. While biologic explanations are plausible, the association may in part arise from more frequent prostate cancer screening among those with a diabetes diagnosis. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the association between diabetes and prostate cancer screening.

METHODS: We examined differences in prostate cancer screening (prostate-specific antigen and/or digital rectal examination) testing practices after a diabetes diagnosis among lower-income persons living in the southeastern United States and enrolled in the Southern Community Cohort Study between 2002 …

Sexual Coercion And Sexual Violence At First Intercourse Associated With Sexually Transmitted Infections, Corrine M. Williams, Emily R. Clear, Ann L. Coker

CRVAW Faculty Journal Articles

BACKGROUND: Violence against women has been associated with subsequent risky sexual behaviors and sexually transmitted infections (STIs). We explored whether sexual coercion or violence at first intercourse was associated with self-reported STIs.

METHODS: Using nationally representative data from the 2006 to 2010 National Survey of Family Growth, we analyzed female respondents aged 18 to 44 (n = 9466) who answered questions on coercion at first intercourse (wantedness, voluntariness, and types of force used) and STIs using logistic regression analyses. We explored degrees of coercion, which we label as neither, sexual coercion (unwanted or nonphysical force), or sexual violence (involuntary or …

Test Order Effects In Simultaneous Protocols, Abdulrazaq Imam, Timothy A. Warner

Psychology

Simultaneous protocols typically yield poorer stimulus equivalence outcomes than do other protocols commonly used in equivalence research. Two independent groups of three 3-member equivalence sets of stimuli were used in conditional discrimination procedures in two conditions, one using the standard simultaneous protocol and the other using a hybrid simultaneous training and simple-to-complex testing. Participants completed the two conditions in one long session in Experiment 1, but in separate sessions in Experiment 2. The same stimulus sets used in Experiment 1 were randomized for the two conditions in Experiment 2. Overall, accuracy was better with the hybrid than with the standard …

A Multivariate Method To Determine The Dimensionality Of Neural Representation From Population Activity., Jörn Diedrichsen, Tobias Wiestler, Naveed Ejaz

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

How do populations of neurons represent a variable of interest? The notion of feature spaces is a useful concept to approach this question: According to this model, the activation patterns across a neuronal population are composed of different pattern components. The strength of each of these components varies with one latent feature, which together are the dimensions along which the population represents the variable. Here we propose a new method to determine the number of feature dimensions that best describes the activation patterns. The method is based on Gaussian linear classifiers that use only the first d most important pattern …

Skill Learning Strengthens Cortical Representations Of Motor Sequences., Tobias Wiestler, Jörn Diedrichsen

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

Motor-skill learning can be accompanied by both increases and decreases in brain activity. Increases may indicate neural recruitment, while decreases may imply that a region became unimportant or developed a more efficient representation of the skill. These overlapping mechanisms make interpreting learning-related changes of spatially averaged activity difficult. Here we show that motor-skill acquisition is associated with the emergence of highly distinguishable activity patterns for trained movement sequences, in the absence of average activity increases. During functional magnetic resonance imaging, participants produced either four trained or four untrained finger sequences. Using multivariate pattern analysis, both untrained and trained sequences could …

Erps Reveal The Temporal Dynamics Of Auditory Word Recognition In Specific Language Impairment., Jeffrey G Malins, Amy S Desroches, Erin K Robertson, Randy Lynn Newman, Lisa M D Archibald, Marc F Joanisse

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

We used event-related potentials (ERPs) to compare auditory word recognition in children with specific language impairment (SLI group; N=14) to a group of typically developing children (TD group; N=14). Subjects were presented with pictures of items and heard auditory words that either matched or mismatched the pictures. Mismatches overlapped expected words in word-onset (cohort mismatches; see: DOLL, hear: dog), rhyme (CONE -bone), or were unrelated (SHELL -mug). In match trials, the SLI group showed a different pattern of N100 responses to auditory stimuli compared to the TD group, indicative of early auditory processing differences in SLI. However, the phonological mapping …

Dynamic And Opposing Adjustment Of Movement Cancellation And Generation In An Oculomotor Countermanding Task., Brian D Corneil, Joshua C Cheng, Samanthi C Goonetilleke

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

Adaptive adjustments of strategies help optimize behavior in a dynamic and uncertain world. Previous studies in the countermanding (or stop-signal) paradigm have detailed how reaction times (RTs) change with trial sequence, demonstrating adaptive control of movement generation. Comparatively little is known about the adaptive control of movement cancellation in the countermanding task, mainly because movement cancellation implies the absence of an outcome and estimates of movement cancellation require hundreds of trials. Here, we exploit a within-trial proxy of movement cancellation based on recordings of neck muscle activity while human subjects attempted to cancel large eye-head gaze shifts. On a subset …

A Narrative Review Of Yoga And Mindfulness As Complementary Therapies For Addiction., Surbhi Khanna, Jeffrey M Greeson

College of Science & Mathematics Departmental Research

This paper reviews the philosophical origins, current scientific evidence, and clinical promise of yoga and mindfulness as complementary therapies for addiction. Historically, there are eight elements of yoga that, together, comprise ethical principles and practices for living a meaningful, purposeful, moral and self-disciplined life. Traditional yoga practices, including postures and meditation, direct attention toward one's health, while acknowledging the spiritual aspects of one's nature. Mindfulness derives from ancient Buddhist philosophy, and mindfulness meditation practices, such as gentle Hatha yoga and mindful breathing, are increasingly integrated into secular health care settings. Current theoretical models suggest that the skills, insights, and self-awareness …

Two Distinct Ipsilateral Cortical Representations For Individuated Finger Movements., Jörn Diedrichsen, Tobias Wiestler, John W Krakauer

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

Movements of the upper limb are controlled mostly through the contralateral hemisphere. Although overall activity changes in the ipsilateral motor cortex have been reported, their functional significance remains unclear. Using human functional imaging, we analyzed neural finger representations by studying differences in fine-grained activation patterns for single isometric finger presses. We demonstrate that cortical motor areas encode ipsilateral movements in 2 fundamentally different ways. During unimanual ipsilateral finger presses, primary sensory and motor cortices show, underneath global suppression, finger-specific activity patterns that are nearly identical to those elicited by contralateral mirror-symmetric action. This component vanishes when both motor cortices are …

Decoding The Neural Mechanisms Of Human Tool Use., Jason P Gallivan, D Adam Mclean, Kenneth F Valyear, Jody C Culham

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

Sophisticated tool use is a defining characteristic of the primate species but how is it supported by the brain, particularly the human brain? Here we show, using functional MRI and pattern classification methods, that tool use is subserved by multiple distributed action-centred neural representations that are both shared with and distinct from those of the hand. In areas of frontoparietal cortex we found a common representation for planned hand- and tool-related actions. In contrast, in parietal and occipitotemporal regions implicated in hand actions and body perception we found that coding remained selectively linked to upcoming actions of the hand whereas …

The Human Brain Processes Syntax In The Absence Of Conscious Awareness., Laura Batterink, Helen J Neville

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

Syntax is the core computational component of language. A longstanding idea about syntactic processing is that it is generally not available to conscious access, operating autonomously and automatically. However, there is little direct neurocognitive evidence on this issue. By measuring event-related potentials while human observers performed a novel cross-modal distraction task, we demonstrated that syntactic violations that were not consciously detected nonetheless produced a characteristic early neural response pattern, and also significantly delayed reaction times to a concurrent task. This early neural response was distinct from later neural activity that was observed only to syntactic violations that were consciously detected. …

Hd-Cnv: Hotspot Detector For Copy Number Variants., Jenna L Butler, Marjorie Elizabeth Osborne Locke, Kathleen A Hill, Mark Daley

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

SUMMARY: Copy number variants (CNVs) are a major source of genetic variation. Comparing CNVs between samples is important in elucidating their potential effects in a wide variety of biological contexts. HD-CNV (hotspot detector for copy number variants) is a tool for downstream analysis of previously identified CNV regions from multiple samples, and it detects recurrent regions by finding cliques in an interval graph generated from the input. It creates a unique graphical representation of the data, as well as summary spreadsheets and UCSC (University of California, Santa Cruz) Genome Browser track files. The interval graph, when viewed with other software …

Acute Alcohol Consumption Impairs Controlled But Not Automatic Processes In A Psychophysical Pointing Paradigm., Kevin Johnston, Brian Timney, Melvyn A Goodale

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

Numerous studies have investigated the effects of alcohol consumption on controlled and automatic cognitive processes. Such studies have shown that alcohol impairs performance on tasks requiring conscious, intentional control, while leaving automatic performance relatively intact. Here, we sought to extend these findings to aspects of visuomotor control by investigating the effects of alcohol in a visuomotor pointing paradigm that allowed us to separate the influence of controlled and automatic processes. Six male participants were assigned to an experimental "correction" condition in which they were instructed to point at a visual target as quickly and accurately as possible. On a small …

Language, Reading, And Math Learning Profiles In An Epidemiological Sample Of School Age Children., Lisa M D Archibald, Janis Oram Cardy, Marc F Joanisse, Daniel Ansari

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

Dyscalculia, dyslexia, and specific language impairment (SLI) are relatively specific developmental learning disabilities in math, reading, and oral language, respectively, that occur in the context of average intellectual capacity and adequate environmental opportunities. Past research has been dominated by studies focused on single impairments despite the widespread recognition that overlapping and comorbid deficits are common. The present study took an epidemiological approach to study the learning profiles of a large school age sample in language, reading, and math. Both general learning profiles reflecting good or poor performance across measures and specific learning profiles involving either weak language, weak reading, weak …

Differential Effects Of Parkinson's Disease And Dopamine Replacement On Memory Encoding And Retrieval., Alex A Macdonald, Ken N Seergobin, Adrian M Owen, Ruzbeh Tamjeedi, Oury Monchi, Hooman Ganjavi, Penny A Macdonald

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

Increasingly memory deficits are recognized in Parkinson's disease (PD). In PD, the dopamine-producing cells of the substantia nigra (SN) are significantly degenerated whereas those in the ventral tegmental area (VTA) are relatively spared. Dopamine-replacement medication improves cognitive processes that implicate the SN-innervated dorsal striatum but is thought to impair those that depend upon the VTA-supplied ventral striatum, limbic and prefrontal cortices. Our aim was to examine memory encoding and retrieval in PD and how they are affected by dopamine replacement. Twenty-nine PD patients performed the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test (RAVLT) and a non-verbal analogue, the Aggie Figures Learning Test …

Report Of A Deaf Child With Tourette's Disorder., Cathy J Chovaz

Psychology

This is a case study of a deaf child with Tourette's Disorder (TD). Hearing parents and mental health clinicians unfamiliar with typical behaviors of deaf children may have difficulties differentiating the clinical presentation of symptoms of TD from the effects of deafness, as well as in implementing appropriate interventions. This case study reports the history, symptoms, diagnostic process, and treatment interventions. This is relevant for furthering the clinical knowledge of mental health professionals working with Deaf, deaf, and hard-of-hearing children and adolescents.

Transforming The Healthcare Response To Intimate Partner Violence And Taking Best Practices To Scale, Michele R. Decker, Shannon Frattaroli, Brigid Mccaw, Ann L. Coker, Elizabeth Miller, Phyllis Sharps, Wendy G. Lane, Mahua Mandal, Kelli Hirsch, Donna M. Strobino, Wendy L. Bennett, Jacquelyn Campbell, Andrea Gielen

CRVAW Faculty Journal Articles

BACKGROUND: Intimate partner violence (IPV) is prevalent among adolescent and adult women, with significant physical, sexual, and mental health consequences. In 2011, the Institute of Medicine's Clinical Preventive Services for Women consensus report recommended universal screening for violence as a component of women's preventive services; this policy has been adopted by the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA). These policy developments require that effective clinic-based interventions be identified, easily implemented, and taken to scale.

METHODS: To foster dialogue about implementing effective interventions, we convened a symposium entitled "Responding to Violence Against Women: Emerging Evidence, Implementation Science, and Innovative Interventions," on …

Expanding The Basic Science Debate: The Role Of Physics Knowledge In Interpreting Clinical Findings., Mark Goldszmidt, John Paul Minda, Sarah L Devantier, Aimee L Skye, Nicole N Woods

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

Current research suggests a role for biomedical knowledge in learning and retaining concepts related to medical diagnosis. However, learning may be influenced by other, non-biomedical knowledge. We explored this idea using an experimental design and examined the effects of causal knowledge on the learning, retention, and interpretation of medical information. Participants studied a handout about several respiratory disorders and how to interpret respiratory exam findings. The control group received the information in standard "textbook" format and the experimental group was presented with the same information as well as a causal explanation about how sound travels through lungs in both the …

Perceptual Fluency Can Be Used As A Cue For Categorization Decisions., Sarah J Miles, John Paul Minda

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

Learning in the prototype distortion task is thought to involve perceptual learning in which category members experience an enhanced visual response (Ashby & Maddox. Annual Review of Psychology, 56, 149-178, 2005). This response likely leads to more-efficient processing, which in turn may result in a feeling of perceptual fluency for category members. We examined the perceptual-fluency hypothesis by manipulating fluency independently from category membership. We predicted that when perceptual fluency was induced using subliminal priming, this fluency would be misattributed to category membership and would affect categorization decisions. In a prototype distortion task, the participants were more likely to judge …

Behavioral And Fmri Evidence That Cognitive Ability Modulates The Effect Of Semantic Context On Speech Intelligibility, Adriana A Zekveld, Mary Rudner, Ingrid Johnsrude, Dirk J Heslenfeld, Jerker Rönnberg

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

Text cues facilitate the perception of spoken sentences to which they are semantically related (Zekveld, Rudner, et al., 2011). In this study, semantically related and unrelated cues preceding sentences evoked more activation in middle temporal gyrus (MTG) and inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) than nonword cues, regardless of acoustic quality (speech in noise or speech in quiet). Larger verbal working memory (WM) capacity (reading span) was associated with greater intelligibility benefit obtained from related cues, with less speech-related activation in the left superior temporal gyrus and left anterior IFG, and with more activation in right medial frontal cortex for related versus …

Discounting Of Hypothetical Monetary Outcomes That Are Both Delayed And Probabilistic, Ariana Mae Vanderveldt

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

The value of an outcome is affected both by the delay until its receipt: delay discounting) and by the likelihood of its receipt: probability discounting). Despite being well described by the same hyperboloid function, delay and probability discounting involve fundamentally different processes, as represented by the opposite effect amount has on the degree to which delayed and probabilistic rewards are discounted. Most of the previous research has studied the discounting of delayed and of probabilistic rewards separately, with little research examining more complex situations in which the rewards are both delayed and probabilistic. In the present experiment, participants made choices …

Greater Benefits Of Multisensory Integration During Complex Sensorimotor Transformations., Verena N Buchholz, Samanthi C Goonetilleke, W Pieter Medendorp, Brian D Corneil

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

Multisensory integration enables rapid and accurate behavior. To orient in space, sensory information registered initially in different reference frames has to be integrated with the current postural information to produce an appropriate motor response. In some postures, multisensory integration requires convergence of sensory evidence across hemispheres, which would presumably lessen or hinder integration. Here, we examined orienting gaze shifts in humans to visual, tactile, or visuotactile stimuli when the hands were either in a default uncrossed posture or a crossed posture requiring convergence across hemispheres. Surprisingly, we observed the greatest benefits of multisensory integration in the crossed posture, as indexed …

Encoding Of Sensory Prediction Errors In The Human Cerebellum., John Schlerf, Richard B Ivry, Jörn Diedrichsen

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

A central tenet of motor neuroscience is that the cerebellum learns from sensory prediction errors. Surprisingly, neuroimaging studies have not revealed definitive signatures of error processing in the cerebellum. Furthermore, neurophysiologic studies suggest an asymmetry, such that the cerebellum may encode errors arising from unexpected sensory events, but not errors reflecting the omission of expected stimuli. We conducted an imaging study to compare the cerebellar response to these two types of errors. Participants made fast out-and-back reaching movements, aiming either for an object that delivered a force pulse if intersected or for a gap between two objects, either of which …

Unfakeable Facial Configurations Affect Strategic Choices In Trust Games With Or Without Information About Past Behavior, Constantin Rezlescu, Brad Duchaine, Christopher Y. Olivola, Nick Chater

Dartmouth Scholarship

Background:

Many human interactions are built on trust, so widespread confidence in first impressions generally favors individuals with trustworthy-looking appearances. However, few studies have explicitly examined: 1) the contribution of unfakeable facial features to trust-based decisions, and 2) how these cues are integrated with information about past behavior.

Methodology/Principal Findings:

Using highly controlled stimuli and an improved experimental procedure, we show that unfakeable facial features associated with the appearance of trustworthiness attract higher investments in trust games. The facial trustworthiness premium is large for decisions based solely on faces, with trustworthy identities attracting 42% more money (Study 1), and remains …

Rapid Perceptual Learning Of Noise-Vocoded Speech Requires Attention, Julia Jones Huyck, Ingrid Johnsrude

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

Humans are able to adapt to unfamiliar forms of speech (such as accented, time-compressed, or noise-vocoded speech) quite rapidly. Can such perceptual learning occur when attention is directed away from the speech signal? Here, participants were simultaneously exposed to noise-vocoded sentences, auditory distractors, and visual distractors. One group attended to the speech, listening to each sentence and reporting what they heard. Two other groups attended to either the auditory or visual distractors, performing a target-detection task. Only the attend-speech group benefited from the exposure when subsequently reporting noise-vocoded sentences. Thus, attention to noise-vocoded speech appears necessary for learning.

Discriminating Famous From Fictional Names Based On Lifetime Experience: Evidence In Support Of A Signal-Detection Model Based On Finite Mixture Distributions., Ben Bowles, Iain M Harlow, Melissa M Meeking, Stefan Köhler

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

It is widely accepted that signal-detection mechanisms contribute to item-recognition memory decisions that involve discriminations between targets and lures based on a controlled laboratory study episode. Here, the authors employed mathematical modeling of receiver operating characteristics (ROC) to determine whether and how a signal-detection mechanism contributes to discriminations between moderately famous and fictional names based on lifetime experience. Unique to fame judgments is a lack of control over participants' previous exposure to the stimuli deemed "targets" by the experimenter; specifically, if they pertain to moderately famous individuals, participants may have had no prior exposure to a substantial proportion of the …

Distinct Patterns Of Functional And Effective Connectivity Between Perirhinal Cortex And Other Cortical Regions In Recognition Memory And Perceptual Discrimination., Edward B O'Neil, Andrea B Protzner, Cornelia Mccormick, D Adam Mclean, Jordan Poppenk, Anthony D Cate, Stefan Köhler

Brain and Mind Institute Researchers' Publications

Traditionally, the medial temporal lobe (MTL) is thought to be dedicated to declarative memory. Recent evidence challenges this view, suggesting that perirhinal cortex (PrC), which interfaces the MTL with the ventral visual pathway, supports highly integrated object representations in recognition memory and perceptual discrimination. Even with comparable representational demands, perceptual and memory tasks differ in numerous task demands and the subjective experience they evoke. Here, we tested whether such differences are reflected in distinct patterns of connectivity between PrC and other cortical regions, including differential involvement of prefrontal control processes. We examined functional magnetic resonance imaging data for closely matched …

Animal Cognition, The Importance Of Touch, And The Cit, Deirdre Yeater

Presidential Seminar on the Catholic Intellectual Tradition

A presentation of Professor Yeater's incorporation in her class PSCC103 of 5 in- class discussions comparing human and non-human species, particularly dolphins, with an emphasis on the Catholic Intellectual Tradition and the importance of touch. PSCC-103, The Human Community: The Individual and Society, is a 3 credit course which engages students in a study of the relationship between psychology – the science of human behavior and mental processes, and the Catholic intellectual tradition – which is characterized by rigorous intellectual inquiry and an openness to scientific ideas. This course aims to help us understand ourselves as human persons, as well …