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.

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.