Cognitive Neuroscience Commons^™

The Cranial Nerves And Electrical Stimulation, Devin K. P. Adair

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Cranial nerves provide afferent pathways that enable bottom-up modulation of central autonomic and cognitive neural pathways. Because these pathways project to brainstem nuclei such as the nucleus tractus solitarius and engage neuromodulatory systems, including the locus coeruleus, electrical stimulation offers a mechanistically grounded approach to influencing brain function. This thesis tested whether active transcutaneous auricular vagus nerve stimulation (taVNS) produces physiological responses indicative of parasympathetic engagement, defined as decreases in heart rate, increases in heart rate variability, and decreases in respiration relative to a dose-matched earlobe control condition. Using cardiac and respiratory measures as physiological markers, taVNS at the tragus …

From Insect Cognition To Sentience: Exploring The Edge, Catherine Macri, Martin Giurfa

Animal Sentience

What does The Edge of Sentience tell us about insect sentience and consciousness? In this commentary, we reflect on Jonathan Birch’s framework for defining and scientifically investigating sentience in animals. We discuss the methodological challenges of studying subjective experience in evolutionary distant species, and consider trace conditioning, affective states, and neural architectures as potential windows into consciousness in insects. We argue that uncertainty, whether concerning definitions or methodology, should not prevent experimental investigation; rather it should motivate new approaches and experimental designs for exploring the diversity of conscious experience.

Testing P300-Based Biometric Authentication Paradigms, Jordan Razzak

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Bench research suggests that P300 amplitude is greater in response to self-relevant stimuli compared to familiar stimuli. This effect could enable a novel method of biometric authentication based on the self-relevant P300. This dissertation aims to: (1) determine the optimal presentation paradigm for leveraging self-relevance in P300-based biometric authentication, and (2) investigate P300 responses from self-relevant stimuli versus stimuli learned over the course of a week.

Two presentation paradigms were compared – rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) and matrix presentation (MP). Participant-specific RSVP and MP classifiers were trained by applying stepwise linear discriminant analysis to data collected during presentations of …

The Relationship Between Depression And Cognitive Proficiency Index Across Biological Sex, Angela N. Ferdinardo

Dissertations

Depression is a widely studied mood disorder, and understanding its effect on cognitive functioning has become an important area of research. While research has examined relationships among depression, working memory, and cognitive deficits, limited research has explored depressive symptoms and cognitive proficiency across biological sex. Depression manifests similarly in men and women, though men are more likely to experience irritability, impulsivity, and anger, while women tend to experience sadness, stress, and sleep disturbances (Johns Hopkins Medicine, 2023). Women are also more likely to seek treatment and cope differently than men. This study examined the relationship between depression and cognitive proficiency …

Oxidative Stress Mediated Glutamate Release And Nmda Receptor-Dependent Synaptic Remodeling In Radiation-Induced Cognitive Dysfunction, Thanh Lam

Dissertations and Theses (Open Access)

In children younger than 14 years old, the brain and other parts of the central nervous system are the most common sites for solid tumors. Radiotherapy is an effective treatment for central nervous system (CNS) tumors. However, it often causes a progressive decline in cognitive functions, which is especially devastating for pediatric patients. Although post-mitotic neurons are generally considered resistant to radiation-induced immediate cell death, ionizing radiation causes complex neurochemical and structural changes that damage synaptic integrity. In this study, we examined the molecular cascades following a 10 Gy radiation dose applied to mouse cortical neurons. We found that radiation-induced …

What Does Sentience Mean At The Neural Level?, Björn Brembs

Animal Sentience

Jonathan Birch's (2025) LSE criteria for sentience include motivational trade-offs, exemplified by C. elegansweighing hunger against desiccation risk. Yet once the neural circuit is known, this "trade-off" reduces to a single inhibitory synapse—an ‘elemental’ account discrediting the ‘molar’ one. My commentary illustrates the same discrepancy in Drosophila: dopaminergic ramping during courtship as it progressively suppresses threat-detecting neurons; so persistence past danger reflects recalibrated valuation rather than a weighed decision. As neurobiology increasingly discovers such discrepancies, all criteria resting on behavioral classifications risk being defined away without altering the behavior's validity.

Ai Is Not The Kind Of Thing That Can Ever Be Sentient, Lori Marino

Animal Sentience

Sentience evolved to allow organisms to move through their environment avoiding harms and achieving benefits. Sentience did not evolve from computation. It evolved from valenced feelings. AI (even robots) are not embodied and are not the kind of thing that needs to be sentient. There is no way to get from computations to feelings. They are qualitatively different things. We should avoid being lulled into thinking that an inanimate object designed to engage our propensity for anthropomorphism, like AI, is actually a mind.

Look Out For Our Kind, Christof Koch

Animal Sentience

Strongly supportive overall of Birch’s broad tent Sentience Project, I offer an alternative dyadic, single-class, two-stage process based on estimating the probability for sentience, and the associated confidence, for any individual or taxonomic group. I criticize Birch’s narrow computational framework when addressing the question of algorithmic sentience; there are alternative approaches.

Mapping The Neuroexposome: Integrative Analysis Of Dementia Risk Factors Through Multi-Omics And Environmental Profiling In The Egyptian Population., Mai Ahmed Saadzaghloul Othman

Theses and Dissertations

Background: Dementia represents one of the most pressing public health challenges of the twenty-first century, with the global burden projected to reach 153 million cases by 2050. Egypt, as the most populous Arab nation, faces a corresponding rise in age-related diseases, yet comprehensive data from low- and middle-income countries remain severely limited. The neuroexposome framework, integrating genetic susceptibility, environmental exposures, and metabolic alterations, offers a powerful strategy to characterize the complex interplay between internal and external risk factors for Alzheimer's disease (AD) and Alzheimer's disease Related Dementias (ADRD).

Objectives: This thesis aimed to: (1) examine the distribution of APOE alleles …

Determinants Of Corporal Punishment And Severe Physical Punishment In Egypt: A Mixed-Methods Analysis For Child Protection Policy, Marwa Moustafa Nassef

Theses and Dissertations

Corporal punishment (CP) and severe physical punishment (SPP) remain a major public health, child rights, and child protection policy concern. In Egypt, despite legislative reforms, survey-weighted analysis of the 2021 Egypt Family Health Survey (EFHS) 2021 (CAPMAS, 2022) reveals prevalence rates of 60.5% for CP and 27.4% for SPP among children aged 1–14 (author’s calculations using EFHS-2021, n=7623), yet evidence distinguishing the determinants of routine corporal punishment from escalation to severe physical punishment remains limited in low- and middle-income contexts. Guided by Bronfenbrenner’s ecological framework, this mixed-methods study identifies key drivers of CP and its escalation to SPP among Egyptian …

How Temporal Integration And Complexity Drive Musical Enjoyment, August Miller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Music is a type of aesthetic stimulus that unfolds dynamically over time. Combining approaches from previous research on musical preferences and research on spatial integration as a driver of visual aesthetic appreciation, we investigated how the integration of musical percepts over time influences listener enjoyment and the level of agreement between the enjoyment ratings of each listener. We used a DNN tool to quantify temporal dependencies in 32 music clips and also computed complexity scores for them. Subjects listened to each music clip while using a rotating dial to provide a continuous enjoyment rating, changing the dial’s position at the …

A Predictive Coding Account Of Spatial Working Memory Following Prophylactic Levetiracetam Administration Prior To Traumatic Brain Injury, Omeima Mutwali

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Traumatic brain injury (TBI) symptom prevention and remediation is an important area of research that would benefit vulnerable groups, including active-duty and veteran soldiers. These patients can sustain penetrative forces in fields of combat or in training, which result in focal lesions that trigger inflammatory and degenerative processes in the brain. Both primary and secondary injuries are associated with changes to cognition, behavior and affective state. This disease poses increased risk of epileptogenesis, as well. Given these outcomes, prior research has evaluated levetiracetam (LEV) as a prophylactic treatment for seizures, cognitive deficits and negative emotionality. LEV acts as a presynaptic …

Neural Correlates Of Recognition Memory And Metamemory In Breast Cancer Survivors: An Event-Related Potential Study, Dishari Zaman Azad

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Breast cancer survivors (BCS) often report noticeable cognitive difficulties despite showing limited impairment on standardized neuropsychological tests. Some have theorized that this is simply an insensitivity of standardized testing to subtle cognitive changes (test-insensitivity hypothesis), whereas others have suggested there are early neural changes that are detected by patients but precede detection by these tests (early signal hypothesis) or that when they achieve normal performance, it is through saliently effortful compensatory processes (compensation hypothesis). The present study tested these theories by assessing metamemory and recognition memory retrieval in BCS and non-cancer controls (NCC) using both behavioral and event-related potential (ERP) …

Reducing The Complexity Of The Experimental Design Attenuates Trait-Level Effects In Threat Safety Discrimination Learning, Justin M. Lazzarino

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Trait measures of negative emotionality have sometimes been shown to play a role in shaping threat learning, but findings are mixed. For example, Johnson et al (2023) showed that the inhibitory and prospective subscales of the Intolerance for Uncertainty Scale (IUS) were associated with diminished and enhanced threat-safety discrimination, respectively, during the acquisition phase of a Pavlovian fear conditioning task. This finding was subsequently replicated in an independent sample (Kinney-Petrucha, 2024, unpublished). However, these findings and other trait-level fear acquisition effects have not been consistently observed in the broader fear learning literature. Variation in the complexity of or uncertainty inherent …

Somatic Prosthetics For Planetary Resonance, Disha Dharesh Kumar R

Masters Theses

This thesis investigates how industrial design can transcend extractive technological paradigms in favor of relational interfaces that foster planetary attunement. Framing the climate crisis as a 'crisis of imagination', the research challenges the Western bifurcation of nature and culture by drawing on Indic cosmologies- which recognize stones, plants, and ecosystems as conscious at different levels and participants in a shared cosmic field. By synthesizing research in Biosemiotics, Quantum Information Pansycishm, and Neuroscience, the project redefines intelligence as a distributed, more-than-human phenomenon.

The research materializes as a speculative design artifact: a device that functions as a somatic prosthetic for planetary resonance. …

Foveate, Dahlia Aggarwal

Masters Theses

This thesis investigates how textiles can unsettle visual assumptions, encouraging a perceptual shift. Through weaving, upholstery, and spatial installation, the work stages a tension between what a surface appears to be and how it is encountered by the body. Through woven pattern, tactile texture, and trompe l’oeil textile surfaces, perception is something negotiated rather than fixed: the eye anticipates one reality while the hand discovers another.

Drawing on a range of sensations gathered from observing landscape formations and textures, it translates enduring scale and material qualities into an interior landscape of woven surfaces and textile-based furniture. Rather than serving as …

Empowering Women: Understanding Neurological Changes In The Aging Brain, Joy Mckenzie

InnovateHER Meeting 2026

Women tend to have more neurological changes than men as they age starting in their mid-30s (Mosconi, 2024). While aging is a natural process, the neurological changes can impact a woman’s personal and professional quality of life (Faubion et al., 2023; Gravini, 2023). For years, women’s neurological symptoms have been ignored by being told that their experiences are normal and just a part of life (Haver, 2025). That narrative is starting to shift with the increased awareness of changes specific to women. There are resources to assess cognitive changes such as memory, processing speed, and word finding and strategies to …

Designing For The Brain: Neuroarchitecture, Isabella Schutte

Hospitality Design Graduate Student Capstones

This capstone explores how principles from neuroscience can inform the design of micro-scale architectural environments to support emotional well-being and cognitive clarity. Through research, sensory analysis, immersive VR testing, and physiological and perceptual data collection, the project investigates how elements such as light, materiality, form, and atmosphere influence human experience. By comparing existing, aesthetic, and neuroscience-informed environments, the study suggests that intentional sensory design may better support restoration, stress regulation, and overall well-being within everyday spaces.

Understanding Behavioral And Representational Divergences Of Humans And Machines, Thomas Lasman Botch

Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations

Human behavior and cognition are strikingly variable: people differ from one another in their preferences and abilities, and even from themselves across situations. Yet this diversity arises from common neural machinery shaped by the complex environments humans inhabit. A central objective of cognitive neuroscience is to understand how this varied experience emerges from interactions between brains, agents, and environments. In this dissertation, I argue that comparing behavior and neural computation across humans, artificial systems, and contexts is essential for understanding the flexibility of human cognition. Across three chapters, I use this comparative approach to examine how the rich, multimodal contexts …

The Legacy Of Lead: Lead Exposure's Harmful Effects And Its Concentration In Poc Communities, Layla Sophronia Barber

Student Theses 2015-Present

This thesis examines the disproportionate burden of lead exposure carried by low income, POC communities. The systemic nature of this problem is a symptom of a longstanding legacy of environmental injustice in the United States. Decades of federal neglect are reflected in the higher statistics of lead exposure and poisoning in predominantly black communities. While it is understood that lead exposure poses a serious threat to physical health and early cognitive development, there is a discouraging lack of urgency to remove the toxin from non-wealthy communities. The material covered by this thesis aims to identify and correct the discriminatory social …