Cognitive Neuroscience Commons^™

Going Beyond Just-So Stories, Brian Key

Animal Sentience

Colloquial arguments for fish feeling pain are deeply rooted in anthropometric tendencies that confuse escape responses to noxious stimuli with evidence for consciousness. More developed arguments often rely on just-so stories of fish displaying complex behaviours as proof of consciousness. In response to commentaries on the idea that fish do not feel pain, I raise the need to go beyond just-so stories and to rigorously analyse the neural circuitry responsible for specific behaviours using new and emerging technologies in neuroscience. By deciphering the causal relationship between neural information processing and conscious behaviour, it should be possible to assess cogently the …

How Welfare Biology And Commonsense May Help To Reduce Animal Suffering, Yew-Kwang Ng

Animal Sentience

Welfare biology is the study of the welfare of living things. Welfare is net happiness (enjoyment minus suffering). Since this necessarily involves feelings, Dawkins (2014) has suggested that animal welfare science may face a paradox, because feelings are very difficult to study. The following paper provides an explanation for how welfare biology could help to reduce this paradox by answering some difficult questions regarding animal welfare. Simple means based on commonsense could reduce animal suffering enormously at low or even negative costs to humans. Ways to increase the influence of animal welfare advocates are also discussed, focusing initially on farmed …

Animal Suffering Calls For More Than A Bigger Cage, Simon R. B. Leadbeater

Animal Sentience

Ng (2016) argues for incremental welfare biology partly because it would be impossible to demonstrate conclusively that animals are sentient. He argues that low cost changes in industrial practices and working collaboratively may be more effective in advancing animal welfare than more adversarial approaches. There is merit in some of Ng’s recommendations but a number of his arguments are, in my view, misdirected. The fact that nonhuman animals feel has already been adequately demonstrated. Cruelty to animals is intrinsic to some industries, so the only way to oppose it is to oppose the industry.

Why Animal Welfarism Continues To Fail, Lori Marino

Animal Sentience

Welfarism prioritizes human interests over the needs of nonhuman animals. Despite decades of welfare efforts other animals are mostly worse off than ever before, being subjected to increasingly invasive and harmful treatments, especially in the factory farming and biomedical research areas. A legal rights-based approach is essential in order for other animals to be protected from the varying ethical whims of our species.

End-State Welfarism, Joel Marks

Animal Sentience

Yew-Kwang Ng’s research is the work of an obviously sincere, intelligent, and conscientious animal advocate. But I am unable to accept his starting assumption that animal welfare is an appropriate basis for animal ethics. More specifically I argue that animal welfare as a means to animal liberation is an issue that can be debated, but animal welfare as the ultimate end or goal of animal advocacy is misguided.

Death In The Family, Maria Botero

Animal Sentience

Barbara King presents grief as the result of the capacity of human and non-human animals for social and affectionate bonds. This is a novel approach that provides a context for interpreting behavioral evidence of grief. The book also offers thought-provoking insights into the relationship between emotion and the expression of emotion. The most surprising element of King’s approach is that, throughout the book, her account of non-human animal grief forces us to reassess the way we treat them.

The Object Of Grief, Clark Glymour

Animal Sentience

King’s new book is a wonderful collection of diverse anecdotes illustrating the variety of animal practices that are convincing illustrations of grief. Those who want scientific arguments for that conclusion should, however, read elsewhere.

Understanding Emotional Suffering, Barbara J. King

Animal Sentience

In responding to insightful commentaries from 7 scholars, for which I am grateful, I offer new thoughts on whether animals can conceptualize and express signs of grief. I also discuss why I included both weak and strong examples of animal mourning, and how this work may help us think about enhanced welfare for animals, including freedom from emotional suffering.

The Effects Of External Focus Of Attention Exercise Rehabilitation On Dual Task Walking In Parkinson's Disease, Eric N. Beck

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Parkinson’s disease impairs control of well-learned movements, and therefore, individuals with Parkinson’s disease are forced to walk with greater conscious control. This causes difficulties while walking and completing a secondary task simultaneously (dual tasking), in that distractions from conscious control of walking increase the risk of falls and injury. Although, attention-based exercise may be a potential avenue to decrease the demands associated with walking in Parkinson’s disease. For example, an external focus of attention (on manipulated objects) has been found to recruit the networks that are important for walking with little conscious control (automatic control networks). In contrast, an internal …

Disentangling Embodied Cognition: An Examination Of The State, Problems, And Possibilities Of Embodied Cognition, Cody Cash

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Embodied cognition has received a fair amount of attention in philosophical, neuroscientific, and robotic research during the past several decades, yet the precise nature of its goals, methods, and claims are unclear. This dissertation will ascertain and examine the primary themes in the field of embodied cognition as well as why, and if, they offer significant challenges to traditional cognitive science models. Though many theories believe they are providing accounts that should replace traditional models, to do so they will have to overcome the very difficult challenge of arguing that mental content and capabilities derived from sensorimotor activity can continue …

Concussion Awareness And Educational Outreach Through A Website And Mobile Application, Daniel J. Brogan

Neuroscience Summer Fellows

In recent years concussions have become a more apparent problem in youth and adolescent sports. 1 in 5 high school students will sustain a concussion during the season. Due to medical and scientific advances, the diagnosis of concussions is becoming much simpler with key markers that are signs for an injury. Returning to play too soon before an athlete is fully recovered increases the likelihood that serious and irreversible neurological deficits can occur. Symptoms for concussions are necessary to track in order for an athlete to properly report their recovery to a physician. Doctors primarily rely on a patient’s report …

Spatiotemporal Fluctuations Of Olfactory Stimuli And Its Detection By An Optical Method, Mitu Chandra Acharjee

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Olfactory processing in the mammalian brain is a highly dynamic process, yet most of the olfaction experiments have been studied primarily with static stimuli. Odors in the natural environment are transported by turbulent flow of air or water. Natural odorants have fluctuations in concentration and it changes rapidly with time. These rapid fluctuations may pose some challenges to identifying an odor; on the other hand, the variation itself may provide important clues about the odor source. The goal of this thesis project was to create a similar odorant environment like the rapid odor fluctuations encountered in nature – to meet …

The Bounded Log-Odds Model Of Frequency And Probability Distortion, Hang Zhang, Laurence T. Maloney

MODVIS Workshop

No abstract provided.

Putting Saliency In Its Place, John K. Tsotsos

MODVIS Workshop

The role of attention and the place within the visual processing stream where the concept of saliency has been situated is critically examined by considering the experimental evidence and performing tests that link experiment to computation.

A Conceptual Framework Of Computations In Mid-Level Vision, Jonas Kubilius, Johan Wagemans, Hans P. Op De Beeck

MODVIS Workshop

The goal of visual processing is to extract information necessary for a variety of tasks, such as grasping objects, navigating in scenes, and recognizing them. While ultimately these tasks might be carried out by separate processing pathways, they nonetheless share a common root in the early and intermediate visual areas. What representations should these areas develop in order to facilitate all of these higher-level tasks? Several distinct ideas have received empirical support in the literature so far: (i) boundary feature detection, such as edge, corner, and curved segment extraction; (ii) second-order feature detection, such as the difference in orientation or …

Axonal Activity In Vivo: Technical Considerations And Implications For The Exploration Of Neural Circuits In Freely Moving Animals, Jeremy M. Barry

Dartmouth Scholarship

While extracellular somatic action potentials from freely moving rats have been well characterized, axonal activity has not. We have recently reported extracellular tetrode recordings of short duration waveforms (SDWs) with an average peak-trough duration less than 172μs. These waveforms have significantly shorter duration than somatic action potentials and tend to be triphasic. The present review discusses further data that suggests SDWs are representative of axonal activity, how this characterization allows for more accurate classification of somatic activity and could serve as a means of exploring signal integration in neural circuits. The review also discusses how axons may function as more …

An Exploratory High-Density Eeg Investigation Of The Misinformation Effect: Attentional And Recollective Differences Between True And False Perceptual Memories, John E. Kiat, Robert F. Belli

Department of Psychology: Faculty Publications

The misinformation effect, a phenomenon in which eyewitness memories are altered via exposure to post-event misinformation, is one of the most important paradigms used to investigate the reconstructive nature of human memory. The aim of this study was to use the misinformation effect paradigm to investigate differences in attentional and recollective processing between true and false event memories. Nineteen participants completed a variant of the misinformation paradigm in which recognition responses to true and misinformation based event details embedded within a narrative context, were investigated using high-density (256-channel) EEG with a 1-day delay between event exposure and test. Source monitoring …

Spike Field Coherence (Sfc) For Ripples In Rat Hippocampus, Pranav Singla

Honors Scholar Theses

The aim of this project was to determine coherence between two types of neural recordings which can be obtained from the rat hippocampus: spikes and local field potentials. Extracellular recording makes it possible to determine spiking activity from individual neurons in the vicinity of the recording electrode. Local field potential recording gives a combined activity of many neurons (thousands) at once to determine an overall picture of the coordination of the cells in real time. Here we examine the relationship between these two signals, focusing on place cells which spike at their maximal rate only at certain positions in physical …

Design, Programming, And User-Experience, Kaila G. Manca

Honors Scholar Theses

This thesis is a culmination of my individualized major in Human-Computer Interaction. As such, it showcases my knowledge of design, computer engineering, user-experience research, and puts into practice my background in psychology, com- munications, and neuroscience.

I provided full-service design and development for a web application to be used by the Digital Media and Design Department and their students.This process involved several iterations of user-experience research, testing, concepting, branding and strategy, ideation, and design. It lead to two products.

The first product is full-scale development and optimization of the web appli- cation.The web application adheres to best practices. It was …

Estrodial Effects On Age-Related Shifts In Learning And Memory: A Multiple Memory Systems Approach, Luis Castelan

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

Many findings from our lab and others suggest that circulating estrogens as well as estrogen replacement after ovariectomy influence cognitive performance. Young female rats trained during proestrus, when estrogens are high, or with acute estradiol (E2) administration after ovariectomy perform better on the hippocampus-sensitive place task but worse on the striatum-sensitive response task (Korol et al., 2004; Korol and Kolo, 2002). Behavioral neuroscience studies tend to use male rodent models to avoid the complexities of the female reproductive cycle, producing a gap in our knowledge about neural mechanisms of learning and memory in females. As a consequence, age-related effects of …