Megan Chiovaro, Psychological Sciences

Current Research: As a trained beekeeper, I have accumulated an in-depth knowledge of invertebrate social dynamics. Having recently delved into the field of collective intelligence, I see striking parallels between social insects and humans. In my short time here I have become familiar with current work applying models of their behaviors to other fields, such as neuroscience and engineering. With the help of my graduate advisor, Alex Paxton, I am preparing a submission for the 2019 International Conference of Perception and Action (ICPA). We are working to create a symposium on collective behavior and are planning a talk to bridge psychology and ecology, beginning with collective intelligence in honeybees. After submission, I plan to focus on collective behavior as a dynamical system, paying special attention to the individual processes that lead to emergent group-level behavior. I hope to inform the literature of underlying laws and social dynamics that enable their impeccable ability to create emergent whole-hive actions. I am particularly interested in modeling nest-site selection, in which bees must identify suitable hive locations and attempt to convince the rest of the hive to choose it over other sites. Previous research has already established parallels between this phenomena and human neural decision-making processes (Visscher, 2007; Passino et al., 2008). My strong interdisciplinary background in mathematics, dynamics, and ecology will be a great asset for these fields and for IBaCS.

Lana Delasanta, Psychological Sciences

Current Research: The goal of the IBACS Summer Fellowship proposal is to determine the functional neuroanatomical basis of the Neural Resonance Theory (NRT) dynamical systems model by identifying the brain regions involved in neural entrainment to acoustic rhythms. Wasserman et al. (in prep) were able to uncover clear evidence of entrainment of neural oscillations to musical rhythms. Using a model based on the NRT, which consists of two oscillatory neural networks that are predicted to be located in sensory and motor planning brain regions, they demonstrated that model sensory and motor networks together can explain a significant proportion of the variance observed in the collected EEG responses. This experiment utilized 32-channel EEG, however, so the true origins of the EEG responses cannot be identified. My research is extending this paradigm to use 256-channel EEG together with structural MRI scans to localize the sources of activity, testing the functional neuroanatomy of the NRT. Subjects will come into the lab and listen to complex (and simple and randomized controls) rhythms while EEG is recorded and then tap along once they find a steady pulse. Using inverse current models, I expect to show that both motor and auditory regions of the brain become entrained, and that source activity within these regions is predicted by the NRT model. The results of this project will provide pilot data for the resubmission of an R01 grant by Drs. Hancock, Large, and Chen, as well as my NRSA application.

Eleanor Fisk, Human Development & Family Sciences

Current Research: During my first year as a doctoral student in the HDFS department, I have been working with Dr. Caitlin Lombardi exploring topics related to the development of cognitive and behavioral skills over early childhood and the role of children’s early care and education (ECE) experiences. In one project, we are examining how children’s ECE experiences influence the economic and psychological functioning of parents. A large body of existing literature has documented beneficial associations between ECE and children’s development, but links between ECE and parental well-being have received much less attention. Theoretical perspectives suggest that ECE settings that are developmentally supportive and stimulating for children may have significant implications for parents, in terms of employment quality, mental health, stress, and anxiety. Our goal here is to understand how these contextual aspects of children’s early developmental environments may benefit parents in ways that indirectly influence children’s development. This work has been submitted to be presented at the Society for Research on Child Development’s Biennial Meeting in March.

The findings from this work, along with the supervision and collaboration with Dr. Lombardi, who is trained in understanding influences in children’s school readiness skills, will provide a background for this fellowship in which I hope to explore the interconnections between the development of behavioral and cognitive skills over early childhood.

Phillip Frazier, Psychological Sciences

Current Research: My research extends the concept of self-organization to the dynamics of goal-directed action. My question is this: How do organisms assemble their degrees of freedom (DOF) to jointly satisfy goal and task constraints. In one set of studies, I presented students with repeating sequences of L and R arrows, and they responded by pressing the matching key. There are two ways to realize the goal "press matching key": 1) wait for the arrow and then respond; or 2) learn the sequence and respond in anticipation of the arrow. When both options are available, we have a case of "bi-stability," where students switch between modes. Increasing the sequence length makes the first more attractive; decreasing it makes the second more attractive. From the self-organization perspective, the two modes are attractors, and we should see signatures of metastability and criticality in the resulting RT time series. Using the well-established Hurst exponent (H), we can predict changes in long-range correlations and fractal structure. My research has confirmed the above stated hypotheses: on average, the shorter the sequence of L and R arrows, the higher the H. This suggests that goal directedness involves the setting up of attractors which recruit appropriate DOF. My research crosses traditional boundaries by grounding inquiry in self-organization, using tools from statistical physics and dynamical systems, and integrating questions about goals and intentionality with those from movement science.

Cara Hardy, Neuroscience/Center on Aging

Current Research:My work lies at the intersection of neuroscience, aging, and urinary physiology. In animal models, we study the brain-bladder axis in the context of aging to determine if the urinary dysfunction often seen in aged populations is a result of central nervous system failures, failures in the bladder tissue, or a combination of both. Our results are supportive of a new model of urinary dysfunction in which the brain, not the bladder, may be the primary culprit of age-related dysfunction. We will now leverage this new understanding to investigate urinary dysfunction in Alzheimer’s disease (AD), long presumed to be the result of cognitive dysfunction. Since our findings point to urinary dysfunction being a systemic problem, we hypothesize an AD bladder structural and functional phenotype. This will be my primary work over the next few years as I complete my PhD training. The overlap of molecular investigations in neurodegeneration, bladder physiology, and cognitive neuroscience will provide with an optimal platform from which to launch an interdisciplinary academic research career.

Julianna Herman, Physiology & Neurobiology

Current Research: During my first semester, I began to investigate the effects of in utero neuraminidase injection (intraventricular) on the ependymal lining of the lateral ventricle. Neuraminidase is a major component of the influenza virus that causes loss of ependymal cells. It cleaves the glycosidic linkages binding ependymal cells at the ventricle surface, potentially leading to developmental complications such as hydrocephalus in neonatal mice. To study this further, I will perform intraventricular injection of mouse-adapted influenza virus via in utero injection. With collaboration from Dr. Paulo Verardi’s virology lab in the Department of Pathobiology, neuraminidase and influenza injections will be compared to parse component effects of infection. The brains of affected mice will be assessed following coronal sectioning and analysis of brain tissue using immunohistochemistry in combination with detailed confocal microscopy to identify cellular damage. Simultaneously, I will perform influenza injections into the placenta of mice to more accurately simulate fetal exposure to influenza. This will help to determine how embryonic exposure to mouse-adapted influenza virus impacts brain development of embryonic mice during a mother’s illness, specifically through the interference with the ependyma and stem cell niche at the ventricular surface. Receiving the 2018 IBACS Graduate Fellowship would support my research efforts and help to make my NIH F31 application competitive.

Derek Lee, Physiology & Neurobiology

Current Research: In a Drosophila model of traumatic brain injury (TBI), we mimic administration of the putatively neuroprotective high-fat, low-carbohydrate ketogenic diet (KD) via direct addition of ketone bodies (KBs) to standard high-carbohydrate fly diets. Our initial experiments have shown that KB supplementation exerts significant amelioration of negative behavioral outcomes subsequent to TBI. Specifically, flies subjected to TBI show reduced aggression and improved performance on learning tasks when fed KB-supplemented diets, as compared with Drosophila fed a standard diet. These results suggest that previously-reported neuroprotective properties of an actual KD may be due to the presence of KBs, regardless of carbohydrate concentration. Additionally, we found no difference in basal fly motility under any dietary or head-trauma condition, suggesting that observed behavioral effects may operate through neuroprotection of behaviorally-specific neurocircuitry, as opposed to general lethargy.

Amanda Mankovich, Psychological Sciences

Current Research:During the Spring 2019 semester I will take a novel approach to Dr. Naigles’ Longitudinal Study of Early Language by evaluating the relationship between exploratory play and language. Previously, these videos were coded for language profiles and joint attention episodes. In collaboration with Drs. Naigles and Sheya, I will study what the child and parent are actually doing with their verbal and manual attention during joint attention episodes. The purpose of this project is to explore whether children who engage in more sophisticated types of object play acquire words more quickly. This is potentially evident in comprehension measures (i.e., degree of shape bias) as well as production measures (spontaneous speech, checklist data). And crucially, to what degree is emerging object play a function of the parental input elicited during the play? The data consists of 40 video recorded sessions of mom-child dyads engaged in 30 minutes of free and structured play. Participants include children with autism spectrum disorder and initially language-matched neurotypical children. To evaluate relationships between parent-child lexical organization and sensory-motor behaviors, I will code moment-to-moment parent-child actions on objects, attention and language. Our analysis merges language and social coordination research by comparing temporal sequences of the exploration data to concurrent and subsequent language profiles and joint attention episodes.

Hannah Morrow, Psychological Sciences

Current Research: Much of my work at UConn has focused on how we acquire and use conceptual knowledge. Concepts are integral to almost every aspect of our lives; for almost any task, one needs an understanding of an object, an emotion, a person, or various other "things" that make up our conceptual knowledge. This topic stands at the intersection of developmental, psycholinguistic, clinical, cognitive, and neuroscience research. For example, I am running an EEG experiment looking into the neural dynamics of integrating visual, auditory, and lexical information into a single concept. This cognitive neuroscience project has implications in developmental and clinical domains, as individuals with autism spectrum disorder and schizophrenia both struggle with sensory integration, which can impede processes like speech perception, learning, etc. I am also leading a project on the effects of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) on cognitive control, with the aim of understanding how different regions of the brain participate in selectively attending to relevant information about a concept in order to achieve a goal. Additionally, I have been involved in an external collaboration with Gary Lupyan at the University of Wisconsin-Madison on how linguistic elements of labels influence how we name objects. This is a project rooted in psycholinguistics, with developmental implications for how we learn and name objects.

Briana Oshiro, Mathematics

Current Research: My research uses interdisciplinary methods and theory from mathematics, education, and cognitive neuroscience to develop applied approaches to teaching problem-solving skills. Recently, applying problem-solving research to the education of children and adults has become increasingly relevant. Improving children’s problem-solving skills is one goal in the Common Core Mathematics Standards, and both the international assessments PIAAC and PISA contain a dedicated problem-solving section on their tests (1, 2, 3). However, only recently have neuroimaging methods been applied to problem-solving research, and my study seeks to integrate these methods with the theories in existing problem-solving literature.

Robert Pijewski, Neuroscience

Current Research: My current research at UConn Health is elucidating the bioenergetic function of neural progenitor cells derived from patients with multiple sclerosis. More specifically, I am identifying salient characteristics of mitochondrial morphology and function as a way to identify causes of downstream glial pathology. The objective of my work is to understand how disease-related changes in cellular metabolism lead to glial pathology in the CNS. I will use MS patient-derived iPS cells, differentiate these into neural progenitor cells and study the how perturbed metabolism in these NPCs affects glia differentiation. My current work is to explore findings our lab has recently reported that patient iPS-derived cells fundamentally differ from age-matched controls..

Over the next six months, I am refining the experimental methods to isolate and study mitochondria from these patient-derived cells. Mitochondria have become a focus in our lab because previous research has shown that NPCs from MS patients exhibit a unique cellular aging phenotype called cellular senescence. My research proposal is aimed to characterize the morphological, functional, and genetic differences in mitochondria from patient-derived NPCs.

Kasey Smith, Psychological Sciences

Current Research: In the next 6 months, I will collaborate on an interdisciplinary project with advisors James Chrobak, Heather Read, and Monty Escabi to examine and unify theories of vocalization sequence perception and short-term memory. My first goal is to complete and submit our current study to J Neuroscience. In Jan. 2019, we will begin a study examining discrimination of species-specific vocalization sequences. Markus Wohr (Seffer et al., 2014) found rats classify prosocial and pup calls, but these studies have not determined brain mechanisms, perceptual resolution, or short-term memory dependence for this ability. We will train rats and quantify how perceptual discrimination varies with timing and number of vocalizations in a sequence. The Brain Computer Interface (BCI) core will calibrate, deliver and monitor the vocalizations which are inaudible to humans. Starting in May, we will implant intracranial μECoG arrays in trained rats on an IACUC protocol (Escabi, Read et al., 2014). The BCI core can record 300 channels from the arrays in awake-behaving rats (Insanally et al., J Neural Eng 2016). We will record sound-evoked potentials to examine the hypothesis that categorical perception of vocalization sequences varies with alignment with intrinsic brain oscillations and onset of sounds. I will submit the study to the Association for Research in Otolaryngology 2019 conference (aro.org) and will use the pilot data to apply for a federal pre-doctoral National Research Service Award.

Preeti Srinivasan, Communication

Current Research: I am investigating attentional patterns via eye-tracking to test how news stimuli presented using three different formats (text, video, video with text) on social media differ and whether this can affect learning outcomes. I am also examining the effects of cognitive processes such as elaboration (using a thought-listing task), engagement (willingness and actual engagement), and need for cognition, on learning (recognition and recall). The study uses a mixed methods approach wherein participants first answer questions about their general social media news consumption, and then engage with one of six news stories [2(story type: Science, Health) X 2(presentation: text, video, video with text)]. Participants will then be shown a video clip of their attentional patterns and asked to reflect on their experience (qualitative interviews). In line with past literature, we anticipate that mode of presentation will affect attention such that text (text only and text in the video with text condition) elicits greater attention than videos and graphics. Using principles from traditional Cognitive Science and Human-Computer interaction, the study seeks to answer the research question on how modality affects learning outcomes. Further, we intend to tease apart differences between intentions and actual engagement, using the qualitative interviews. This experiment should help us shed light on attentional processes and their impacts on various stages of information processing.

Vivi Tecoulesco, Psychological Sciences

Current Research: Next semester I will collecting ABR pilot data for an NSF grant submission by Emily Myers and Erika Skoe. I am again doing cross-disciplinary work with SLHS now investigating categorical perception. I will also be collecting data for a project examining the relationship between ABR specificity and semantics in adults. This is an investigation of the degree to which early neural encoding of speech by the brainstem has a cascading effect on phonology and lexical semantics. I will be recording ABRs to three speech sounds (/da/, /ba/, and /ga/) and analyzing how specific the responses are for the three sounds, that is how distinctly the brainstem encodes these three sounds, and how much the neural encoding of these sounds overlaps. Individual differences in ABR specificity will then be related to phonological discrimination ability and vocabulary size. I will also be designing and producing the stimuli and test measures for my F31submission (see below) which will also be my dissertation project. I would like to start collecting pilot data in the summer. Smaller projects I am working on include studying morphological skills in children with ASD via a Wug test, and analyzing the spectral content of ABRs to speech sounds in children with ASD. My work attempts to cross boundaries by bringing the gap between the earliest neural encoding of speech and higher order language outcomes.

Jen-Hau Yang, Psychological Sciences

Current Research:Using the established mouse touchscreen paradigm, I will be investigating the role of the vesicular monoamine transport 2 (VMAT-2) gene in motivated behavior. VMAT-2 is a crucial protein that transports monoamines, especially DA, into synaptic vesicles. Previous studies from our lab have shown that rats treated with VMAT-2 inhibitor tetrabenazine (TBZ) showed a low-effort bias. Specifically, they shift their preference from lever-pressing for preferred food pellets to eating less preferred but concurrently available lab chow. The current project aims to examine the effects of TBZ on well-trained C57/BL6 mice performing touchscreen effort-related choice paradigm. Additionally, genetically altered mice with higher or lower VMAT-2 gene expression will be tested on various ratio requirements (the number of PPs needed for preferred milkshake reward). It is hypothesized that a motivational impairment will be induced by TBZ, and also will be seen in mice with lower VMAT-2 expression, particularly when the work requirement of the schedule is high. In other words, mice with limited VMAT-2 activity will show a shift in preference from PP to PI compared with vehicle treated or wild-type mice, respectively. This project may have significance for cross-species validation and translational research. More importantly, by combining pharmacological and genetic studies, our work sheds light on the relation between cognitive sciences and the neural basis of motivational pathologies.