Neuroscience and Neurobiology Commons^™

Flanker Task Performance In Young And Older Adults: A Behavioral And Erp Study, Fatima Medrano

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Research suggests that as we get older, executive function abilities decline (Hasher & Zacks, 1988; Salthouse, 1996). One affected ability is that of inhibitory control, which aids in monitoring our responses to non-target stimuli or information. Current research on inhibition reveals inconsistencies across studies. Monitoring brain responses during the Flanker (used to measure inhibitory control) task may add valuable insight into the processes underlying group differences behaviorally, by studying the N200 and P300 event-related potentials which have been associated with inhibitory control processes. This study investigated whether there are differences between older and younger adults in inhibitory control and whether …

Prenatal Alcohol Exposure Induces Anatomical Changes In The Mouse Somatosensory Cortex., Zahra Saad Siddiqui

Dartmouth College Master’s Theses

Atypical tactile responses are implicated in Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorders (FASD). Our lab reported diminished tactile sensitivity in young adolescent mice with a history of prenatal alcohol exposure (PAE). Here, I employed immunohistochemistry to investigate the anatomical correlates of altered tactile sensitivity observed in mice with PAE. Using our 3-day binge paradigm, I examined changes in the distribution pattern of pre- (thalamocortical afferents) and postsynaptic (pyramidal neurons) partners involved in processing tactile information in the SSC of Postnatal day (P) 7 mice. In rodents, tactile information is relayed somatotopically to the SSC via TC afferents expressing vesicular glutamate transporter 2 …

Brain Science And Brain-Inspired Intelligence In Intelligent Era, Xu Zhang

Bulletin of Chinese Academy of Sciences (Chinese Version)

With intelligence technology as the core technology and intelligent computing power as the productive force, the intelligent era has once again pushed brain science to the forefront of world science and technology. Brain science is the science that studies the nature and rule of cognition and intelligence of human, animal, and machine. A comprehensive analysis of the structure and functional connection rule of the nervous system will eventually draw the functional connectivity map of the brain. In the past decade, neuroscience research has been committed to systematically analyzing the types of neurons and neural structural connections of the nervous system, …

The Multipurpose Dna Repair/Redox Protein Ape1 In Rodent And Human Lewy Body Disease, Kristin Marie Miner

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Lewy body disorders are a family of neurodegenerative conditions characterized by proteostatic and redox disequilibrium, leading to deposition of the abundant protein α-synuclein in hallmark inclusions and oxidative damage to DNA. Sublethal oxidative DNA damage in neurons is repaired predominantly by the base excision repair pathway, which involves the coordinated activity of several enzymes, including apurinic/apyrimidinic endonuclease 1 (APE1). Despite emerging connections between α-synuclein, oxidative stress, and DNA damage/repair, along with evidence demonstrating the multifunctional nature of APE1, the link between APE1 and α-synuclein has not yet been explored.

Here, we conducted a broad investigation of APE1 in the context …

How Sensory Exploration Using Expressive Arts Provides A Cohesive Experience For Children With Multiple Diagnoses, Chanelle Goguen

Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses

This thesis looks at the potential benefits and cohesive experience of sensory exploration for children with multiple diagnoses through a trauma informed lens. The researcher was inspired by Prendiville’s (2021) idea of how interactive sensory exploration and art making can help foster and develop reciprocal communication and socio-affective relationships influenced the researcher to design a method that would be used to collect data about potential similar findings. In the method, the interaction of the sensory-specific art mediums were reflected through the expressive therapies continuum (ETC) framework. The research of this thesis acknowledges and explores how trauma and adverse childhood experiences …

Towards A New Role Of Mitochondrial Hydrogen Peroxide In Synaptic Function, Cliyahnelle Z. Alexander

Student Theses and Dissertations

Aerobic metabolism is known to generate damaging ROS, particularly hydrogen peroxide. Reactive oxygen species (ROS) are highly reactive molecules containing oxygen that have the potential to cause damage to cells and tissues in the body. ROS are highly reactive atoms or molecules that rapidly interact with other molecules within a cell. Intracellular accumulation can result in oxidative damage, dysfunction, and cell death. Due to the limitations of H₂O₂ (hydrogen peroxide) detectors, other impacts of ROS exposure may have been missed. HyPer7, a genetically encoded sensor, measures hydrogen peroxide emissions precisely and sensitively, even at sublethal levels, during …

The Effect Of Novel Microtubule Modulators On Experimental Lewy Body Disease, Anuj S. Jamenis

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In Lewy body disorders, α-synuclein aggregates are believed to destabilize the microtubular framework. However, microtubules are a challenging therapeutic target, as excessive rigidity or flexibility afforded by microtubule modulators may be neurotoxic. Thus, the objective of the present study was to evaluate dual-acting microtubule- stabilizing/destabilizing agents in cellular and animal models of early-stage Lewy body disease.

In Aim 1 we tested the dual-acting tricylic pyrimido[4,5-b]indole analogs AG161-47 and AG161-41 in an in vitro preformed fibril induced model of Lewy body disease. We found that both compounds reduced preformed fibril-seeded α-synucleinopathy without toxicity in primary hippocampal cultures. AG161-47 subtly impacted microtubule …

Astrocyte Spatial Distribution Affects Growth Dynamics Of Breast Cancer Brain Metastases: An Agent-Based Modeling Study, Rupleen Kaur

Biology and Medicine Through Mathematics Conference

No abstract provided.

Fusing Classic Motion Energy Models And Deep Learning For Coarse-To-Fine Moving Object Segmentation, Matthias Tangemann, Matthias Kümmerer, Matthias Bethge

MODVIS Workshop

Classic motion energy models are able to predict a wide range of physiological and behavioral aspects of motion perception in humans. Whether these models can be used as a basis for higher-level tasks, such as moving object segmentation, has however hardly been explored yet. Here, we present a model that combines a motion energy representation with recent computer vision approaches for figure-ground segmentation of naturalistic stimuli. We find that unlike established motion segmentation models but similar to humans, our model generalizes to random-dot stimuli when only trained on RGB videos.

Perceptual Grouping With Latent Noise, Ben Lonnqvist, Zhengqing Wu, Michael H. Herzog

MODVIS Workshop

Humans effortlessly group elements into objects and segment them from the background and other objects without supervision. For example, the black and white stripes of a zebra are grouped together despite vastly different colors. A thorough theoretical and empirical account of perceptual grouping is still missing – Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), which are considered leading models of the visual system still regularly fail at simplistic perceptual grouping tasks. Here, we propose a counterintuitive unsupervised computational approach to perceptual grouping and segmentation: that they arise because of neural noise, rather than in spite of it. We show that adding noise in …

Facilitation In Pattern Motion Perception Of Self-Operated Stimuli Explained By Adaptive Contrast Normalization, Fulvio Missoni, Francesca Peveri, Andrea Canessa, Giulia Sedda, Vittorio Sanguineti, Silvio P. Sabatini

MODVIS Workshop

Movement can affect the way we make sense of complex visual information. To investigate this issue, we designed an experiment to assess changes of plaid motion perception threshold after a period of sensorimotor contingency experience. We found that movement training facilitates combination of elementary motion cues into a global motion percept. No changes in perceptual thresholds are observed in a passive visual condition. A Bayesian model suggested a reduction, after training, of the cross-talk between two gratings with unbalanced contrasts in corresponding sensory channels. To test plausible neural mechanisms for active reduction of cross-talk in cortical representation of complex visual …

Modeling Human Temporal Eeg Responses To Vr Visual Stimuli, Richard R. Foster, Connor Delaney, Dean J. Krusienski, Cheng Ly

Biology and Medicine Through Mathematics Conference

No abstract provided.

Normalization With Dynamic Weights Predicts Neural And Behavioral Effects Of Orientation Adaptation, Huseyin Boyaci

MODVIS Workshop

Prolonged exposure to an oriented contour causes adaptation and has nontrivial effects on neural activity and perception. For example, the neuron's response amplitude may change (suppression or facilitation), the width of its tuning curve may change (broadening or sharpening), and its preferred orientation may shift (repulsion or attraction). Perceptually, adaptation affects the perceived orientation of a subsequently presented contour (direct and indirect tilt aftereffect) and alters orientation discrimination thresholds. In this study, I show that the normalization model with dynamic weights can predict these empirical results.

Local Geometry Of Elementary Visual Computations, Peter Neri

MODVIS Workshop

Visual operators (e.g. edge detectors) are classically modelled using small circuits involving canonical computations, such as template-matching and gain control. Circuit models explain many aspects of the empirical descriptors that are used to characterize local visual operators, from sensitivity to classification images. Notwithstanding their utility, these models fail to provide a unified framework encompassing the variety of effects observed experimentally, such as the impact of contrast, SNR, and attention on the above descriptors. My goal is to start with a simple, plausible geometrical representation of the perceptual operation carried out by the observer, and to show that this representation is …

Do Mechanisms Of Sinusoidal Contrast Sensitivity Account For Edge Sensitivity?, Lynn Schmittwilken, Felix A. Wichmann, Marianne Maertens

MODVIS Workshop

No abstract provided.

Parkinson's Disease - Association With Anxiety, Depression, And Sleep Disorders, Isabella J. Boroje

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a progressive neurological disorder presenting with motor symptoms, such as tremors at rest, bradykinesia, rigidity, and gait instability, and non-motor symptoms, such as anxiety, depression, excessive daytime sleepiness (EDS), and REM Sleep Behavior Disorder (RBD). The purpose of this study was to examine the associations of anxiety, depression, and EDS scores with being Prodromal (PPD) - at risk of developing the disease (PPD), having been diagnosed with PD, or being a Healthy Control (HC) using a multinomial logistic regression model. Additional analysis examined RBD scores and their difference across PPD, PD, and HC cohorts. The study …

Spike Timing-Dependent Plasticity And Synaptic Scaling Invoke Episodic Bursting In An Excitatory Recurrent Neuronal Population, Ryno Chen, Gregory D. Conradi Smith

Biology and Medicine Through Mathematics Conference

No abstract provided.

Characterization Of Perceptual Spaces From Triadic Similarity Judgments, Jonathan Victor

MODVIS Workshop

Perceptual spaces are mental workspaces that organize a sensory or cognitive domain into a format that supports functions such as comparison, grouping, learning, and generalization. Determining the geometry of a perceptual space – i.e., the properties of the perceptual distances within the space -- is thus crucial not only to understand these intermediate levels of processing at an algorithmic level, but also as a starting point for comparison with neural measures of similarity. While perceptual spaces are often taken to be Euclidean or nearly so (the classic example is trichromatic color space), this assumption, when tested, is often violated. Moreover, …

A Foveated Model Of Visual Discrimination Based On Windowed Texture Statistics, Jan W. Kurzawski, William F. Broderick, Eero P. Simoncelli, Jonathan Winawer

MODVIS Workshop

Most information from visual scenes is discarded by the human nervous system and thus cannot influence visual behavior. Here, we investigated the loss of spatial pattern information. This loss increases dramatically with eccentricity. Recently, models have been developed that average image features in pooling windows whose diameters scale with eccentricity. These models can be used to synthesize “metamers” of natural scenes, images which are physically different but perceptually indistinguishable. Psychophysical experiments have identified the maximum window scaling for which model discrimination abilities match human performance (“critical scaling”). If images are synthesized with pooling windows that exceed critical scaling (“supercritical scaling”), …

Dissecting Bayes: Using Influence Measures To Test Normative Use Of Probability Density Information Derived From A Sample, Laurence T. Maloney, Keiji Ota

MODVIS Workshop

Bayesian decision theory (BDT) is used to model human performance in tasks where the decision maker must compensate for uncertainty in order to gain rewards and avoid losses. BDT prescribes how the decision maker can combine available data, prior knowledge, and value to reach a decision maximizing expected winnings. Do human decision makers actually use BDT in making decisions? Researchers typically compare overall human performance (total winnings or overall percent correct) to the predictions of BDT but we cannot conclude that BDT is an adequate model for human performance based on just overall performance. We break BDT down into elementary …