William Armstrong, Physiology & Neurobiology

Current Research: My research will characterize the role of C1QL3 in HCRT/OX projections to NA neurons in the LC, which are critical to sleep- wake regulation. To approach this question, I will use several techniques including IHC, stereotaxic viral injections, mouse genetics and electrophysiology. First, I will perform IHC and fluorescent in situ hybridization to confirm C1ql3 localization in HCRT/OX neurons. I will then inject AAV-Cre-tdT (tdTomato) into the LHA of a C1ql3-mVenusflox/flox mouse to knock out C1ql3. This will allow me to observe differences in HCRT/OX projections to the LC between control and knockout mice. I hypothesize that C1ql3 knockout will result in decreased HCRT/OX synapse density onto NA neurons in the LC, which I will visualize with IHC and quantify. I also expect decreased synaptic function, which I will assess through slice electrophysiology measuring miniature, spontaneous, and evoked EPSCs. Finally, I will inject AAV-Cre+C1ql3-tdT which I hypothesize will rescue C1QL3 expression and restore HCRT/OX fiber density and transmission to the LC.

This interdisciplinary approach will be the first to identify the function of C1QL3 in HCRT/OX neurons and provides a powerful link between molecular neuroscience and broader behavioral phenomena such as sleep and its disorders. My work could also identify a novel genetic marker or therapeutic avenue for narcolepsy if C1QL3 knockout inhibits HCRT/OX function, paving the way for behavioral assays studying sleep in knockout mice.

Megan Chiovaro, Psychological Sciences

Current Research:

At UConn, I am currently engaged in a variety of projects focused on how individuals work together without leaders. Continuing our work on the Arab Spring, my co-authors and I are investigating the differences between publicly available event datasets. Each dataset has a different way of collecting event data, and these different collection methods can produce drastically different results. We are investigating how these differences impact the results of political science research.

My collaborators and I are also writing a paper for a special issue of Behavior Research Methods comparing various time series analyses, including recurrence quantification analysis, vector auto-regression, and cross-correlation. Each method has strengths and disadvantages, but they are rarely used together. Through this project, we hope to introduce researchers to a variety of time series methods and help outline which may be best for their particular situation.

I am also working on a paper using nonlinear analyses for video and audio time series data. Using data-intensive audio and video analysis techniques, we are analyzing how groups of researchers develop ideas for joint research projects aimed at solving difficult societal health problems. This work is also being formulated as a tutorial with accompanying open source code, so that researchers can use our materials to learn these nonlinear methods.

Kelsey Davinson, Psychological Sciences

Current Research:

My current research on infant neural oscillatory development involves two areas of inquiry: resting-state EEG and EEG mu rhythm’s functional properties. Resting-state EEG (RS-EEG) measures brain rhythms while an individual is awake and not engaged in a task or active cognitive/affective processing. What is not yet understood in infancy is how different RS-EEG contexts affect EEG measures, which is informative when determining the appropriate context for RS-EEG acquisition. Further, an examination of co-occurring EEG rhythms in infancy is rare, but essential to more holistic perspectives of brain development. My secondary data analyses examine RS theta/beta ratio as a measure of the dynamic relationship between multiple neural oscillations in different contexts and across infancy. The focus of my other research plans is on the emergence of EEG mu rhythm’s functional properties. It is reactive during action observation and execution, and these “neural mirroring” properties are potentially informative of social information processing. I will be coding, processing, and EEG recordings from 6- to 9-week-old infants during the performance and perception of mouth gestures. My work will identify the mu rhythm frequency range and if there are neural mirroring properties observed at this early age, both have yet to be explored and will inform our understanding of social cognitive processing. My research incorporates cognitive neuroscience and biopsychosocial approaches to development.

Katelyn DeNegre, Molecular & Cell Biology

Current Research: The goal of my study is to understand the function of Xlr genes in brain development, and to confirm the observation of a transgenerational neurobehavioral defect in our knockdown model. Beginning with a male mouse homozygous for the Xlr3 transgene (P), we will investigate the integrity of brain-specific imprinting, brain transcriptomic profiles and neurobehavioral defects in subsequent generations. Imprinted expression of Xlr3b,4b and 4c will be assessed in F1 female who have inherited the compromised X chromosome from the P males. This female then passes the epimutated X to her offspring (F2). F2 male offspring are of interest because they have exhibited behavioral defects in previous experiments. Total RNA will be extracted from brains from neonatal F2 males and subjected to global transcriptome profiling via RNAseq. Additionally, F2 males grown to adulthood will undergo behavior testing in the MBNF. P generation knockdown males are currently in outcross matings to produce the F1 generation. The outcross allows tracing of X chromosome parental origin in F1 females for imprinting assays. The F2 generation will consist of males who possess the lineage traced X chromosome and are either homozygous for the transgene or are wild-type controls. RNA Seq will allow me to explore whether depletion of Xlr3 mRNA affects transcription of other genes in this tissue, thereby confirming Xlr3 as a mediator of transgenerational effects on neurodevelopment.

Caitrin Hall, Psychological Sciences

Current Research: Underlying my research interests is my desire to support marginalized communities and help eradicate oppressive structures. This has motivated me to advance beyond my psychology coursework to learn about critical race theory, systemic racism, and the resulting detrimental outcomes. My recent experience taking White Racism with sociologist Dr. Noel Cazenave emphasized racism as a system of oppression that requires change at the structural, rather than solely the individual, level. While psychology research will be necessary in restructuring social systems, we must study individuals within the context of the whole. In my future work, I aim to bridge the gap between the individual-level focus of psychology and the societal-level focus of sociology in order to progress toward social justice.

Specifically, I will explore the relationship between individual and collective behavior. Research has found that group synchrony cultivates social connectedness, contributes to interpersonal liking, and increases pain tolerance. Previous findings also demonstrate a link between social connectivity and reduced anxiety levels. Together, these results suggest that synchronizing with others may improve wellbeing. By investigating how environmental and social contexts modulate behavior/health outcomes, we may augment our understanding of perception, action, and cognition while advocating for structural changes and interventions that may increase wellness and success in oppressed populations.

Nathan Lautz, Psychological Sciences

Current Research: I’m currently investigating the functional involvement of visual simulation during language comprehension. After hearing the sentence "The hiker saw an eagle in the sky," people are faster to verify that an image of an eagle with outspread wings depicts something in the sentence than an image of an eagle with closed wings. This "shape match effect" could indicate that sentence comprehension involves perceptual simulation (here, simulating the visual form of the eagle). Ostarek et al. (2019) recently challenged this interpretation, using visual interference targeting different levels of visual processing (from low-level up to images of everyday objects with semantic content) to test if this interference disrupted the match effect. They found that only the stimuli with semantic content eliminated the effect, arguing that perceptual simulation does not underlie the match effect. Alternately, we hypothesized a linear trend in the disruption of the effect as visual interference targets successively higher levels of visual processing, indicating increased functional involvement of the visual system in perceptual simulation in successively higher processing areas. Preliminary modeling has revealed this trend. Next we will examine existing fMRI data to ascertain whether the interference stimuli are indeed processed by regions of increasing computational distance from the periphery. This will help elucidate the neurocognitive basis of perceptual simulation during language processing.

Ruth McLeod, Psychological Sciences

Current Research:In the summer of 2021, my plan is to go back into original medical records to collect additional data about our subjects, including quantification of any underlying conditions that may have further affected their developmental outcomes. This will include the infant’s length of stay in the NICU (an indirect measure of health complications), whether the infant experienced necrotizing enterocolitis (a common form of neonatal GI inflammation), as well as any other complications that may have caused trauma or inflammation during birth. We will use this additional data to get a more detailed and refined picture of how inflammatory conditions and general health modulate the neuroprotective effectiveness of adenosine antagonist treatment. We will also be working to collect data from infants who received no treatment with an adenosine antagonist, and comparing their developmental outcomes to those of matched GA who were treated, either early (< 48 hours post-birth) or late (>48 hours post-birth). This will help us to understand the extent of adenosine antagonist protection, and offer new insights to possible mechanisms of action of adenosine antagonists in the context of inflammatory profiles. Specifically, it remains unclear exactly how adenosine antagonists enhance outcomes in preterms. Putative pathways include a reduction in molecular events following ATP failure that could reduce neuronal death, an attenuation of microglial activation that could preserve neuronal integrity.

Hannah Mechtenberg, Psychological Sciences

Current Research: I have several ongoing projects that span neuroscience and psychology. One current focus is on prepositional, or four-term, analogies that take the structure A:B::C:D. Of particular interest over the next six months is to clarify how psycholinguistic properties—including word frequency, word length, concreteness, and age of acquisition—may affect the perceived difficulty of a given analogy. I am currently running an online behavioral study that will provide evidence for which psycholinguistic properties may matter, and at which position within the prepositional analogy. These results will help guide construction of a new stimuli set that will limit confounds and enable us to examine how semantics influences analogical reasoning. I am also working with a team of researchers at UConn on a project that is using fMRI to characterize the neural networks that support passive listening of continuous speech. Not only are we considering how the phonetic information is represented and disambiguated neurally, but the acoustic, lexical, syntactic, and semantic information as well. A project of this scope transcends typical studies of speech perception that tend to target only one level in the processing hierarchy. Over the next six months we hope to organize each stream of research into a cohesive article that elegantly describes how each thread interacts to support naturalistic speech perception.