Christopher Babigian, Pharmaceutical Science

Current Research: Studies strongly support the involvement of BET proteins in drug-seeking behaviors but fail to address functional roles of individual BET proteins and BD-selective BET mechanisms (BD1 vs. BD2) involved in drug-seeking behaviors. Given the potential side effects linked to pan-BET inhibitors, (i.e., cognitive effects such as memory impairment) new approaches with a high degree of selectively and mechanistic insight are needed to advance BET therapeutics as a viable treatment option for SUD. My current studies build on promising data from our lab (mentioned in the previous section) by using selective, clinically relevant tools to interrogate domain-selective mechanisms of BET proteins in advanced animal models of cocaine use disorder (CUD). My hypothesis is that domain-selective BET inhibition will attenuate drug-seeking behaviors in advanced models of CUD without causing side effects commonly seen with non-selective approaches. Results from these experiments will uncover safer more selective therapeutic options for the treatment of CUD. Data collected from these experiments will be used as preliminary data for my NIH F31 application.

Specifically, I am investigating the impact of domain-selective BET inhibition on cocaine-seeking behaviors. For translational purposes I am testing RVX-208 in more advanced and clinically relevant animal models of CUD disorder (economic demand and extinction/reinstatement following short- and intermittent-access cocaine self-administration).

Cynthia Boo, Psychological Sciences

Current Research: As a part of Dr. Letitia Naigles and Dr. Deborah Fein’s Longitudinal Study of Early Language (Naigles & Fein, 2017), my current research has continued to compare language sampling contexts in children with ASD’s language abilities. I am investigating the production of stative language in teenagers with ASD across two different narrative contexts (storybook versus personal narratives). Studies have found that children with ASD are less likely to produce stative language (e.g., happy, think, confused) compared to their TD peers (Tager-Flusberg, 1992; Siller et al., 2014). However, most of these studies have been conducted solely in the context of storybook narratives, which may not be appropriate for adolescents with ASD. Additionally, Losh & Capps (2003) found differences in volume and complexity between storybook and personal narratives, suggesting that different prompts may afford different language use.

Preliminary findings from these analyses support the idea that language production varies by context. Overall, children from both groups produced fewer stative language terms in the context of storybook narratives than personal narratives. In other words, tapping into personal experiences, especially those with emotional associations, elicited more stative language regardless of diagnostic status. Thus, when assessing stative language production, researchers should consider the ability of the narrative prompt to elicit these terms.

Hayes Brenner, Psychological Sciences

Current Research: I am currently working with Dr. Edward Large in his music dynamics lab. I am contributing to the development, coding, and implementation of nonlinear oscillation networks within MATLAB. These networks seek to model the neurobiological process of rhythmic entrainment (i.e. syncing up to an external oscillating pattern) by mimicking the synchronous neuronal activity within the auditory and motor networks that occurs when one is listening to, and then entrains to, a rhythmic pulse. We hope to expand the scope of this model to encompass entertainment for both Western rhythms (i.e. 4/4 standard time signature) and non-Western rhythms (specifically, nonisochronus Balkan rhythms, typically in 7/4 time signature).

Shawn Cummings, Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences

Current Research: My current research at UConn reconsiders classic ideas in speech communication, specifically through the lens of the lexically guided perceptual recalibration paradigm. ~200 published manuscripts have used this paradigm or a variation since its conception by Norris et al. in 2003, and conventions have naturally developed in theoretical assumptions as well as experimental design. These have allowed for ease of access to important questions, but after two decades of research it is now worth specifically (1) re-examining the role of specific acoustic stimulus properties, especially tied to their method of creation, (2) questioning paradigmatic assumptions such as measuring learning as a between-subject effect, and (3) re- evaluating theoretical characterizations such as perceptual learning being ‘talker specific’.

This line of research is itself interdisciplinary: the paradigm of interest (how cognitive mechanisms deal with variation in sound to meaning mapping in speech) is relevant to and used by linguists, psychologists, speech scientists, cognitive scientists, and others. Understanding, describing, and evaluating the effects as we do –through marrying human behavioral data with an ‘ideal observer’ distributional learning model of incremental adaptation (Kleinschmidt & Jaeger 2015)—additionally connects artificial and biological systems.

Lee Drown, Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences

Current Research: Our work will continue to examine the interplay between voice and phonetic processing by investigating the clinical implications of the individual differences associated with talker adaptation, especially in individuals with lower reading ability. Examining the interaction between voice and phonetic processing will (1) contribute to a theoretical understanding of talker adaptation in speech perception and (2) pave the way for identifying evidence-based practices that may play a role in remediating dyslexia. It is established that individuals with lower reading ability, such as individuals with dyslexia, show impairment in voice identification (Perrachione, Del Tufo & Gabrielli, 2011). It is also known that poor readers, while showing a typical sensitivity to transitional probabilities inherent in language structure, demonstrate deficits in procedural learning (Gabay, Thiessen & Holt, 2015). It remains unknown if impaired voice identification in individuals with poorer reading ability reflects poor associative learning, or merely points towards a reduced sensitivity to the statistical probabilities in the speech signal as prior findings suggest (Perrachione, Del Tufo & Gabrielli, 2011). If poor readers do indeed have augmented difficulty identifying voices compared to typical readers, a subsequent benefit to talker adaptation is also present.

Wesley Leong, Psychological Sciences

Current Research: I am continuing to analyze the Alice EEG datasets to better explain our results, and to rule out potential confounds. The next step is to see if these effects generalize to other linguistic stimuli. To do this, I will use existing EEG data collected by two students in the L&C division – Yanina Prystauka and Zac Ekves – that was recorded while participants read multiple two- sentence pairs. Each pair involved some agent interacting with an object, and so we can build a similarity profile of the agent across both sentences and see if the effect persists after averaging across trials. I will also analyze other publicly-available EEG data, such as the upcoming Le Petit Prince corpus (Stehwien et al 2020), which will feature data from 26 different languages. In the spirit of my previous research, this upcoming work will involve some combination of engineering, neuroscience, psychology, and linguistics.

Prianka Murthy, Psychological Sciences

Current Research:

Aliyar Ozercan, Philosophy

Current Research:

Kristin Simmers, Educational Psychology

Current Research: I plan to study how and to what extent knowledge of the interdisciplinary field of Mind, Brain & Education (MBE) research impacts novice and/or pre-service teachers beliefs, attitudes and practices in the classroom. My hope is that these foundational studies can inform future studies exploring effective MBE teacher education programs as well as the impact these may have on teacher efficacy and student outcomes. The first stage of this proposed work would be to create a measure of MBE knowledge and application, which could be administered to UCONN students in the Neag Teacher Education program and/or to early career educators who are recent graduates from UCONN. This measure would also gauge existing beliefs, attitudes and practices and determine correlation between variables. Once we have established a baseline in all measures, we can use the data to design targeted MBE research integration into existing teacher education or professional development to directly address demonstrated areas of need. This could initially take the form of creating modules and may eventually lead to a graduate certificate program, and would involve the collaboration of faculty across neuroscience, psychology and education departments.

Gray Freeman Thomas, Psychological Sciences

Current Research: Current research plans include collecting survey data about perspectives on contentious topics. The purpose of this research is twofold: (1) it will provide us with rich survey data about the perspectives that University of Connecticut students have on contentious topics, and (2) it will serve as a pre-screening opportunity for future studies conducted in the lab.

This is motivated by recent research on polarization and discussion that serves to persuade others of a particular viewpoint. America has seen an increase in ideological polarization over recent years (i.e., Pew Research Center, 2014), which naturally motivates researchers to investigate how these ideals are communicated with others. It is also important to examine how one communicates and persuades others about these ideas both within and across group ideologies.

This survey will serve as a gauge of general opinion of students at the university on controversial topics, and it will also serve as the foundation for future work inviting participants to come into the lab and discuss these contentious topics with others. This survey may also run for an extended period of time, which will allow rich patterns in the longevity of the data collected.

Emma Wing, Psychological Sciences

Current Research:

I am currently working on a project which asks whether humans’ representations of characters in a story become more integrated when these characters interact. Recent computational modeling shows that an RNN analyzes two characters who interacted in a story as more similar to each other than e.g., two characters who did not interact. We will determine if this is the case in humans by manipulating which character interacts with a key object that recurs throughout a complex, 5-clause story – e.g., 'The aunt told her nephew she/he had punctured the ball. Suddenly, a dog nudged the ball and rolled it under the couch. The ball deflated’. Using the Visual World Paradigm, we will monitor eye movements to appropriate scenes while participants listen to these stories. We predict that at the final “ball” in the example, there will be more looks back to whichever protagonist (referenced with the “she” or the “he” in the first sentence) interacted with the ball. We will also correlate the probability of fixating the protagonist, throughout the sequence, with the equivalent similarity profile generated by the RNNs (described recently in Davis & Altmann, Cognition, 2021).

Like my work earlier this year, and the work proposed, this project explores how object reference is processed during real-time language comprehension. It will provide evidence of specific conceptual representational components of events and will add to our knowledge of human sentence processing.