Biological Psychology Commons^™

Adapting Small Unmanned Aerial Systems For Behavioral Research With Coastal Marine Mammals, Eric Angel Ramos

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Marine mammals inhabit aquatic worlds where their subsurface behavior, cryptic surface profiles, and movements make them difficult to study. New tools are needed to study coastal marine mammals in a world increasing impacted by climate change related shifts in weather and animal distribution patterns. Unmanned aerial systems (UAS) are important remote-sensing tools for studying a range of wildlife including terrestrial and aquatic flora and fauna. These systems offer flexible platforms for adding sensor packages needed for different applications, for example, most are equipped with high-resolution cameras and GPS sensors. The vantage point from an aerial platform dramatically improves the ability …

Music And Its Effects On The Brain, Caitlyn Herron

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This paper will discuss, in short, how music influences our brain, as well as some behavioral and physiological effects as a result. The brain consists of many regions responsible for different cognitive processes, such as learning, memory, recall, speech, and our emotions. It has been found that music helps to facilitate all of these cognitive processes, regardless of its emotional valence or whether the music is active or passive, such as singing or listening to it, respectively. It was discovered that music influences our ability to learn novel concepts related to mathematics, reading, and even language acquisition. It was also …

Developing Sensory Behavioral Assays For Zebrafish Autism Model, Shannon Wagner

Honors College Theses

Individuals of all ages can suffer from a wide variety of symptoms and disabilities that could be diagnosed as Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). Due to new methods and technology, individuals are now being diagnosed in the first two years of their life, which is when the signs of ASD are initially exhibited. Individuals diagnosed with ASD share many similar disabilities and symptoms such as hyperactivity to social, visual, and auditory stimuli, as well as hyposensitivity to olfactory stimuli. Neural circuit-based alterations are widely considered as a cause for these behavioral aberrations. We have created behavioral assays using zebrafish larvae to …

Bubble Stream Production By Belugas (Delphinapterus Leucas), Megan Slack

Theses

Bubble stream production in belugas has been poorly characterized and its function is not well understood. I examined behavioral states when producing bubble streams (“bubbling”), and when bubbling calls, to determine whether bubbling was significantly associated with a particular call category or behavioral state. Using 19 hours of video and audio recordings collected over a two-day period, I quantified bubble streams of a 4-month old calf and an unrelated adult female housed together. Based on the overall activity budgets and pool of vocalizations for both animals, I calculated the expected counts of bubble streams with and without vocalizations, assuming that …

Habitat Use By Bottlenose Dolphins, Tursiops Truncatus, In Roanoke Sound, North Carolina, Shauna Marisa Mcbride

Dissertations

Information on the habitat use of a species is important to develop conservation efforts and management strategies for that species. Roanoke Sound, North Carolina is primarily a seasonal habitat for bottlenose dolphins, Tursiops truncatus, from late spring to early fall, but little information is known about how dolphins use this area. Transect survey data and opportunistic survey data collected by the Outer Banks Center for Dolphin Research from 2009 to 2015 were used to analyze dolphin habitat use. The objectives of this project were to: 1) identify areas that were important to dolphins, 2) determine which behaviors were observed …

Status Signaling And The Characterization Of A Chirp-Like Signal In The Weakly Electric Fish Steatogenys Elegans, Caitlin E. Field

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Sensory systems are critical to both exploratory and communicatory processes, the study of which is critical to our understanding of how animals perceive and respond to their environments. In weakly electric fishes the electrosensory system is utilized for both of these purposes. One type of communication, status signaling, is widespread across taxa and frequently hormonally modulated. This hormonal modulation keeps the signal honest, wherein the status of the sender and the production of the status signal itself are both hormone dependent. We investigated exploratory and communicatory strategies of the electromotor system in pulse-type gymnotiforms, with a focus on status communication …

The Neurobehavioral Consequences Of Gestational And Chronic Atrazine Exposure In Male And Female Sprague Dawley Rats, Jennifer L. Walters

Dissertations

The adverse health risks of exposure to the herbicide, atrazine, in humans are not fully understood. Although numerous studies have demonstrated atrazine to be an endocrine disrupter, the neurobehavioral consequences of atrazine exposure have not been thoroughly examined. The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of environmentally-relevant levels

of gestational followed by continued chronic atrazine exposure on motor function, learning and memory, anxiety, and striatal dopamine content in rodents. Pregnant Sprague Dawley rats were treated by gavage with 100 µg/kg atrazine (ATZ low), 10 me/kg atrazine (ATZ high), or vehicle on

gestational day l through postnatal day …

Effects Of Neonatal Hypoxic Ischemic Brain Injury On Spatial Working Memory, Amanda L. Smith

Master's Theses

Children born prematurely or at very low birth weight (VLBW) have an increased risk for hypoxic ischemic brain injury (HI). HI refers to a lack of adequate blood and oxygen flow in the brain. HI can also occur in the term infant due to birth complications such as prolonged labor, placental dysfunction, or cord prolapse. In both populations (though exact patterns of neuropathology vary) brain damage is likely to occur in the form of decreased hippocampal and cortical volume, and enlargement of the ventricles (Kesler et al., 2004, Nagy et al., 2009). Resulting neuropathology can in turn lead to cognitive …

Autonomic And Behavioral Reactivity To An Acute Laboratory Stressor, Jeremy C. Peres

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Stress has been widely shown to directly influence people’s emotional and behavioral processing as well as their underlying biological systems. This project examined physiological and behavioral responses as indicators of stress and coping in the context of a psychosocial stressor in a controlled laboratory setting. We examined the association between indicators of behavioral coping and underlying physiological reactivity within participants while experiencing stress. Participants included 68 emerging adults. Physiological measures include autonomic biomarkers (e.g., heart-rate, skin conductance) at rest and during the stressor while behavioral indicators that were coded include acute verbal and non-verbal actions exhibited by participants during the …

Effect Of Social Status On Behavioral And Neural Response To Stress, Daniel W. Curry, Kathleen E. Morrison, Matthew A. Cooper

Chancellor’s Honors Program Projects

No abstract provided.