Summer Graduate Fellows

Summer Graduate Fellows 2023

IBACS Summer Graduate Fellowships provide three months of research funding to graduate students working on topics with relevance to the brain and cognitive sciences.

2023 Fellowship Recipients

Alev Ecevitoglu, Psychological Sciences

Current Research: The vast majority of rodent studies on effort-based choice have been conducted in males; however, women are more likely to develop depression than men. Thus, the current study focuses on finding novel treatments by taking a multidisciplinary approach (behavioral and neurochemical) to determine if novel atypical dopamine transporter (DAT) inhibitors can improve motivational dysfunction in female rats. Behavioral assessment of atypical DAT inhibitors: Effort-related motivational functions in female rats. Two novel DAT inhibitors from the NIDA laboratory of Dr. Amy Newman (JJC8-089 and RDS3-094) will be assessed in tests of effort-based decision making using: a) reversal of tetrabenazine-induced low-effort bias as assessed using the concurrent fixed ratio (FR) 5/chow feeding choice task, b) selection of high-effort lever pressing using the concurrent progressive ratio/chow feeding choice task after acute and repeated injections in females. It is hypothesized that both of these compounds will increase the exertion of effort. Pharmacodynamic characterization of the atypical DAT inhibitors in female rats: Microdialysis and pDARPP-32 expression. These compounds will also be tested for their neurochemical effects on nucleus accumbens DA transmission, using microdialysis, and expression of pDARPP-32(Thr34) to provide pre-and postsynaptic measures of DA transmission. It is hypothesized that both compounds will increase extracellular DA and pDARPP-32(Thr34) expression.

Jie Luo, Psychological Sciences

Current Research: My research interests intersect cognitive neuroscience, clinical psychopathology, and translational work in education. My current meta-analysis project, which is part of my Master’s is motivated by the following: (1) While past studies have conducted reviews of EWB neuroimaging studies to find the neural components of EWB, they are primarily qualitative reviews and not quantitative analysis, which may induce investigator bias. (2) EWB is closely associated with outcomes of neuropsychiatric disorders such as depression. By identifying neural components of EWB, we may ultimately understand brain-based phenotypes for predicting and optimizing the outcome of some neuropsychiatric disorders. In my current project and as part of my Master’s project, I plan to go beyond synthesis of the results and the current subjective definition of EWB based on prior observations, and develop a neurally-inspired theory of EWB. My Master's thesis committee includes: Prof. Crystal Park who specializes in clinical psychology, EWB and mind-body interventions, and Prof. Roeland Hancock whose expertise is in cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging meta-analysis. I have proposed my Master’s project and it has been approved. Two trained individuals independently screened, coded, and quality assessed each paper included in this meta-analysis. I am preparing to submit an abstract for the Association for Psychological Sciences Annual Conference (Washington DC, May 25 28, 2023) based on this work.

Jairo Orea, Physiology and Neurobiology

Current Research: Literature reports an understudied short latency circuit directly inputting MGm from the cochlear nucleus. To begin elucidating this non-cannonical circuit, we performed a preliminary set of injections with a reliable retrograde tracer injected in MGm and observed retrograde labeled cells in the dorsal cochlear nucleus (DCN) and more densely in the ventral cochlear nucleus (VCN). The current literature has only studied them with. anterograde or bidirectional tracers in rat. Therefore, we are now carefully mapping them to create the first set of comprehensively mapped retrograde tracer injections from MGm to the cochlear nucleus. I am continuing to conduct injections to provide more detailed mapping of the cochlear inputs into MGm. Determining these connections will allows us to link this circuit to the fear learning circuitry via genetic Cre-recombinase mediated transsynaptic viral tracing. Our preliminary transsynaptic tracing experiments in the MGB and auditory cortex showed transsynaptic transport and in doing so began delineating the challenges that this emerging technique may bring. It additionally sets novel precedent for a possible transsynaptic circuit from MGm/PIN to cortical cells that project directly to the lateral amygdala We have planned experiments to elucidate this circuit using cutting edge microscopic serial multiplexing technologies to improve single cell characterization and allowing synaptic verification at the electron microscope level.

Aleksandra Rusowicz, Psychological Sciences

Current Research: Continuing my interdisciplinary research in psychology and political science, I am currently working with Dr. Pratto and my secondary advisor, School of Nursing Professor Dr. Natalie Shook, to study prejudice and 2020 vote choice. Dr. Shook previously associated sexism, modern racism, and nationalism with 2016 presidential vote choice (Shook et al., 2020). She has since surveyed a large representative sample at multiple timepoints before and after the 2020 presidential election. We seek to replicate her 2016 findings and expand the study by considering the influence of social dominance orientation (SDO), right wing authoritarianism (RWA; Altemeyer, 1981), and disgust sensitivity on vote choice. I also plan to employ electroencephalography (EEG) to replicate Dr. Shook’s study of biased visual attention (Oosterhoff et al., 2018), which illustrated a positive relationship between disgust sensitivity and social conservatism. Neurophysiological studies have linked neural responses to disgust-inducing stimuli and political ideology (Smith et al., 2011; Ahn et al., 2014). I look to extend this research by grounding findings in social psychology theory (e.g., SDO, RWA) and measuring explicit prejudiced attitudes (e.g., sexism, modern racism). By leveraging my advisors’ theoretical and methodological expertise and my own background in neuroimaging, I aim to conduct a comprehensive interdisciplinary investigation of neurocognitive processes underlying prejudiced political attitudes.

Mohammadamin Saraei, Psychological Sciences

Current Research: Previous research has documented the synchronization of emotional responses in the context of collective action, but the mechanisms underpinning this synchrony are unknown. We do not know whether individuals are attuned to the same stimulus; synchronize to those around them; or engage in a more dynamical interaction where each individual syncs to group-level feedback. This is crucial in terms of understanding emotional contagion as well as the role of scale (group size). To answer this question, I will conduct a naturalistic experiment at UConn’s Islamic Center (ICUC), of which I am a member. At ICUC, members regularly perform collective prayers (Salat), in which the crowd, led by a priest (Imam) engages in synchronized bowing and chanting. In this context, I will use wearable sensors to measure emotional arousal, movement, and spatial proximity between participants. This equipment is unobtrusive, and will not interfere with the natural setting of the ritual. Measurements will be obtained from groups of varying sizes.

For analysis, I will obtain a distance matrix between participants and use Cross-Recurrence Quantification Analysis (CRQA) to measure synchrony between all pairs. This will allow me to determine whether people’s emotional responses are primarily attuned to the leader, their nearest neighbors, or to the group properties, such as the average group

Louisa Suting, Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences

Current Research: I recently concluded a pilot study that examined the effectiveness of a novel form of aphasia therapy- based on the principles of attentive reading and constraint summarization. The seven-week virtually administered therapy program was completed by five participants with post-stroke aphasia. The study was a multiple-probe, single-subject design in which each of the five participants served as their own control. Language measures included standardized tests (examining aphasia severity, reading comprehension and production, and functional communication) and spoken and written discourse measures (such as number and percent correct information units). Participants who completed the aphasia treatment demonstrated clinically significant improvement on the standardized tests and improved spoken and written discourse at micro-linguistic and macro-linguistic levels. We also collected Resting-State fMRI data at baseline, two weeks post-treatment, and again at the 5-month post-treatment in all the participants. I presented the preliminary findings of the study at the annual meeting of the Academy of Aphasia. In addition to the improvement in language and discourse measures, we also saw significant improvement in network measures, such as within network coherence in multiple resting state networks. Importantly, we found that the improvements in the coherence of the Language Network positively correlated with improvements in language measures.

Olivia Vanegas, Psychological Sciences

Current Research: My proposed project will assess the efficacy of minor cannabinoids for modulating chronic pain and emotionality. Minor cannabinoids are molecules produced by cannabis that share structural homology with the major cannabinoids THC and CBD. Pain shapes behavior in different ways. Therefore, I will use several different pain modalities (i.e., visceral, neuropathic, and inflammatory) as well as new pain-conditioned and pain-depressed measures, in addition to classic pain-stimulated measures, to guard against false positive analgesic effects. For example, I will use a Thermal Gradient Ring, which produces a range of thermal stimuli to shape stimulus-response relations in real-time, and conditioned place preference, which uses repeated drug/environment pairings to assess more subtle, context-specific pain effects and abuse liability. Although chronic pain, addiction, and psychiatric disorders frequently occur concomitantly in humans, they are often studied individually in experimental animal models. Given the well-established effects of THC on emotionality and preliminary data that minor cannabinoids bind to and activate serotonin receptors, it is likely that some minor cannabinoids also reduce anxiety or depression. Thus, I am training in mouse models of anxiety- and depressive-like behaviors to screen select compounds. Overall, my research in the Kinsey lab uses a multidisciplinary approach to investigate the relationship between pain and emotionality.

Tyler Wrenn, Psychological Sciences

Current Research: As a new graduate student in the Markus lab, I am interested in social behavior and observational learning in rats. Since arriving at UConn I learned to train animals in a double operant chamber learning paradigm. I have also been learning to use an AI assisted program to simultaneously track multiple body part of two rats. My planned Masters research involves enhancing the current set-up to acquire larger behavioral data sets and use novel methods of data analysis. To achieve this goal I’ve initiated a collaboration between the Markus and Paxton lab. The plan is to implement these changes and start collecting data in spring and summer 2023.

Summer Graduate Fellows 2022

IBACS Summer Graduate Fellowships provide three months of research funding to graduate students working on topics with relevance to the brain and cognitive sciences.

2022 Fellowship Recipients

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).

Next semester, I am planning on developing a MATLAB model to represent the dynamic turn-taking process of conversation in neurotypical populations, applying what I have learned with the aforementioned rhythmic networks. This will involve reading up on the literature surrounding the topic and expanding my knowledge of nonlinear dynamics and MATLAB.

Collectively, all of this research rests at the intersection of psychology, neuroscience, physics, mathematics, computer science, linguistics, social psychology, and music cognition.

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:

Up to this point, we have collected some pilot EEG data examining magnocellular (M) pathway functioning in both healthy controls and schizophrenia patients. The EEG data was collected to study visual integration deficits using the Jitter Orientation Visual Integration Task. This task was designed to measure M pathway functioning, which has been indicated to be the primary pathway connected to visual integration deficits (Keane et. al, 2016). We collected data from about 35 healthy participants and 35 schizophrenia patients and will be analyzing the collected EEG data to gain a better understanding M pathway functioning in these populations. Among the healthy populations, we had each participant take the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire in order to organize the healthy participants into a spectrum of low to high schizotypal traits. This was to understand whether there is a relationship between schizotypal traits and visual integration deficits, and whether this relationship could serve as an indicator of larger functioning issues. Being able to compare the healthy and patient population data will enable us to gain a better understanding of differential M pathway functioning, as well as how schizotypal traits may create certain deficit patterns similar to schizophrenia patients. This research is interdisciplinary in its comparison of neural pathway data and behavioral data, and our next step is to understand how this affects functional outcomes in patient populations.

Aliyar Ozercan, Philosophy

Current Research:

The problem I want to tackle can be found in many psychology papers and presentations: ‘can X be a predictor of Theory of Mind,’ or ‘do X have false belief understanding?’ I believe that the majority of these questions are raised due to the fact that psychology defines Theory of Mind coarsely. I plan to approach it as a philosopher and develop a more total model. Thus, in my dissertation, I would like to first argue against the generally accepted idea that Theory of Mind is the ability to understand that others can have false beliefs. Instead of associating ToM only with false-belief tasks, I propose a fine grained account with some essential ‘Sub-Theories of Mind.’ These Sub-Theories include, in the order of their emergence: Theory of Vita, Theory of Emotion, Theory of Intention/Desire, Theory of Knowledge, and finally Theory of Belief.

Additionally, I was an IBRAIN student for the last two years. Currently, I am designing an experiment to offer a solution to a century old question in philosophy of language: what is the semantic contribution of proper names to a sentence?

Moreover, I have just submitted a paper on a linguistic concept, evidentiality, and how it challenges the traditional propositional theories that we have in philosophy of language. It seems that while traditional propositional theories can predict how the nature of languages with lexical evidentiality behave, they fail to explain the weak assertion concept in languages with grammatical evidentiality.

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.

Tingting Zhao, Nursing

Current Research:

I am going to conduct a secondary analysis using infant data and samples during NICU stay and at 8-12 months corrected age (CA) from a large prospective longitudinal study (NR016928, PI: Cong). I will examine the relationships between levels of pain/stress and expression levels of PGC-1 family, AMPK, SIRT-1 and GCN5 genes/protein related to mitochondrial function/dysfunction during NICU stay and 8-12 months CA in preterm infants. The applicant will randomly select 25 preterm infants from each sex subgroup from the parents R01 study (total n=50). Primary measures include: daily pain/stress; Bayley Scale of Infant Development III test at 8-12 months CA; gene expression of PGC-1 family (PGC-1α, PGC-1β and PGC-1- related coactivator [PRC]), AMPK, SIRT-1 and GCN5 and PGC-1 family phosphorylation, acetylation and O-GlcNAcylation at 36-38 weeks CA and 8 -12 months CA. This is a multi-disciplinary research which require the cooperation and expertise from UConn Proteomics & Metabolomics Facility (PMF), Center for Genome Innovation (CGI), Biochemistry and Biophysics lab, School of Nursing, and Connecticut Children's Medical Center.

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.

Summer Graduate Fellows 2021

IBACS Summer Graduate Fellowships provide three months of research funding to graduate students working on topics with relevance to the brain and cognitive sciences.

2021 Fellowship Recipients

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.

Katelyn Mooney, Physiology & Neurobiology

Current Research: Currently I am working on investigating the effectiveness of the ketogenic metabolite beta-hydroxybutyrate (BHB) at mediating the effects of traumatic brain injury in Drosophila melanogaster. Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is induced by concussive head trauma which is commonly seen in contact sports like football, rugby, and soccer. TBI is induced in D. melanogaster by a high- impact trauma (HIT) device, commonly referred to as the “fly banger.” The ketogenic diet (KD) is a low carbohydrate and high fat diet that has been successfully used as a therapy for individuals with seizure disorders like epilepsy. Our research aims to test the effectiveness of the KD at treating the effects of TBI on D. melanogaster, particularly male-male aggression and reduced learning. Due to the KD being difficult to implement in model organisms, it will be simulated by adding the metabolite BHB to standard food formula. BHB is present in two enantiomeric forms, S-beta-hydroxybutyrate and R-beta- hydroxybutyrate. Currently, my research is working to understand which form of BHB is most effective at alleviating post-TBI symptoms. In the past we have been successful at reducing male aggression and improving learned behavior following TBI by supplementing food with racemic BHB, so this research aims to micro analyze whether or not a specific enantiomer (R or S) is required and at what levels, to be most effective.

Summer Graduate Fellows 2020

IBACS Summer Graduate Fellowships provide three months of research funding to graduate students working on topics with relevance to the brain and cognitive sciences.

2020 Fellowship Recipients

Jeffrey Crawford, Psychological Sciences

Current Research: I'm interested in understanding the neural underpinnings of deficits in different domains of cognition in clinical disorders. Specifically, I want to research how sensory perception is integrated by our mind and how that perception can be altered by interference from external and internal stimuli. I am hopeful that this research can lead to the identification of biomarkers that can help better identify disorders such as schizophrenia and autism.

Ashley Parker, Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences

Current Research: Ashley is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences working with Dr. Erika Skoe. Her research examines biological indices of auditory function, primarily using electrophysiological and blood-based measures. Her current research project examines an inner-ear protein, prestin, as a biomarker of cochlear function across the lifespan.

Delaina Pedrick, Biomedical Engineering

Current Research: I recently presented an auditory model I designed of sound mixtures containing speech plus a variety of competing background sounds at the 2019 Advances and Perspectives in Auditory Neuroscience meeting and the 2019 Society for Neuroscience international meeting. The model quantifies the amount of distortion in sound mixtures created by the background noise and can thus be used as a metric of the amount of masking for each background. The contributions from the sounds’ spectrum and amplitude modulation have been considered separately to show that different backgrounds have highly varied masking potential trends despite having identical input SNRs. It also demonstrates that the amount and type of masking depends strongly on the model responses or sound feature being measured (e.g., spectrum vs. modulation). Additionally, I was able to present preliminary electrophysiology data from the Inferior Colliculus (IC) in response to signal in noise sound mixtures motivated by my model. These conferences allowed me to showcase my research and challenged me to present and interpret the results for audiences that ranged from experts in the field to those from entirely unrelated disciplines. With the support of the IBACS I intend to continue to research how the brain encodes sound in the IC as well as the Auditory Cortex and to model the signal transformations that occur naturally in noisy environments in these areas of the brain.

Madeline Quam, Psychological Sciences

Current Research:

As part of Dr. Coppola’s Study of Language and Math, I am investigating the impact of language exposure on non-linguistic representations of exact quantities. In the “Mr. E” task, X balls are dropped into a large elephant toy; either X or X-1 balls exit via his trunk. The child must answer if any balls remain inside. The task is non-verbal since children do not need to count, but instructions and responses require language. The literature holds that performance on non-verbal tasks, in this case, tracking quantities up to 3, does not depend on language. Language exposure for many deaf children begins later, regardless if spoken or signed. Thus, we should not expect differences between deaf and hearing children whose language input begins at birth (Early Language) and for deaf children whose input begins later in development (Later Language). However, preliminary data show that Later Language groups performed worse, even on small quantities. Early Language groups performed similarly independent of language modality.

I will first look at practice trials to ensure that only those who understood the task are included in the analyses. Then I will analyze performance on small quantity trials (2 and 3) to see if success is associated with timing of language exposure.

This research links the fields of language development, cognitive development, and education. These findings are important to scholars as well as the Deaf community with regard to education and language deprivation.

Gianna Raimondi, Physiology and Neurobiology

Current Research: As we have established foundational methodology for tracking the estrous cycle and optimized conditions for inclusion of female subjects, we will explore sexual dimorphisms of fear memory with circuit and synaptic focuses, and add a layer of complexity by understanding shifts in female circuitry over the reproductive cycle. Human imaging studies show differences in amygdala activation between men and women when exposed to emotional stimuli. We will investigate how sex differences may contribute to variations in fear and anxiety circuitry and bridge the interdisciplinary gap between behavioral neuroscience and molecular studies. An interesting hypothesis in sex differences literature claims that the function of sexual dimorphisms on a circuit level exist to converge behavior of males and females into similar outputs. These similarities initially led researchers to believe that behavioral similarities indicate no differences in circuitry, yet we may expect sex differences in the susceptibility to cellular and molecular perturbation as a compensation mechanism. We will study sexual dimorphisms in fear behavior and circuitry, and engage in a robust analysis of these changes, including but not limited to: changes in spine density, diversity of synapse morphology, and changes in gene and protein expression in the amygdala. This will establish a solid foundation of preliminary data to support our applications for external funding.

Skyler Sklenarik, Psychological Sciences

Current Research: My current research aims to explore physiological correlates of approach tendencies and their associations with approach bias scores on an AAT. Currently, we are collecting galvanic skin response measures from male pornography users as they view erotic and neutral images that automatically move toward (approach) or away from (avoid) the participant based on image orientation (i.e., no joystick is used). We also ask participants to complete the erotic-AAT and to respond to pornography use measures. Previously, we demonstrated that erotic approach bias is significantly positively associated with pornography use severity (Sklenarik et al., 2019). Our current research aims to determine whether physiological responses can predict approach biases for erotic stimuli and pornography use severity. Examining these physiological indices provides a unique convergence of the cognitive and physiological components of addiction, which are typically studied separately. We also plan to examine approach biases for addictive substances, including opiates and caffeine, in order to compare the roles that cognitive biases play in behavioral and substance addictions. Importantly, my current research has provided the groundwork for future studies targeting the manipulation of approach biases in order to reduce problematic behaviors. Interventions that aim to reverse approach biases for addictive stimuli could inform treatments based on the modification of maladaptive cognitive processes.

Amanda Wadams, Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences

Current Research: During the Spring 2020 semester, I will complete the analysis of the pilot data. I aim to identify what constitutes a metacognitive impairment based on the results of typical functioning of the control population. I will then determine 1) The degree to which metacognitive impairments are present in PWA 2) Whether metacognitive impairments are related to aphasia severity, aphasia type or the lesion location. We intend to publish these findings in early 2020. In addition, I will be completing a systematic review of metacognitive treatment in people with acquired brain injury, also to be submitted for publication in 2020. The goal of the review is to identify which metacognitive treatments have been found to be effective in the treatment of cognitive and language impairments thus far. We will use this review as a foundation upon which to base planned work on the application of metacognitive treatment for PWA. I am a SLAC trainee and in order to expand my technical skill set and to fulfill the SLAC and IBACS mission of of interdisciplinary collaboration, I have begun a new study in collaboration with Jon Sprouse in the Department of Linguistics. We will be using EEG to determine the relationship of working memory to language in PWA. In my dissertation I intend to bring together the elements learned from the systematic review, the study of metacognition in PWA and NBI, and the EEG study with a goal of making a comprehensive case for the use of metacognitive training for PWA.

Katherine Zavez, Statistics

Current Research: The objective of my dissertation is to develop new theoretical and computational frameworks for dealing with incomplete data in functional data analysis (FDA). In general, functional data are data that are collected continuously or intermittently over a continuum (e.g., EEG, MRI, and sound levels), and are analyzed using FDA. A functional variable (for use in a model) can be constructed by fitting a curve to a set of densely sampled observations over time, space, etc. However, in FDA, complete data are required to estimate model parameters and if data are incomplete, the current default is to exclude incomplete cases from analysis. Consequently, this reduces sample size and may impact the representativeness, which have been shown in the scalar case to lead to inefficient and biased estimates. Incompleteness in functional data is an extensive problem that includes missing scalars, completely missing functions, and incomplete functions. While techniques have been developed to impute missing values in scalar data sets, little has been done theoretically by statisticians to address these problems in functional data sets. My goal is to develop statistical methods for handling incomplete functional data, which researchers across disciplines could apply to various functional data structures to allow them to study topics, questions, and populations that would have otherwise been excluded from research.

Summer Graduate Fellows 2019

IBACS Summer Graduate Fellowships provide three months of research funding to graduate students working on topics with relevance to the brain and cognitive sciences.

2019 Fellowship Recipients

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.

KBs are thought to work in part through opening KATP channels (Ma et al., 2007; Tanner et al., 2011), a class of metabolically-sensitive hyperpolarizing (inhibiting) ion channels. We added a KATP blocker and opener (tolbutamide and diazoxide, respectively) to KB-supplemented food. We observed that Drosophila treated with diazoxide exhibit very similar patterns of aggression as those fed with the ketone body supplementation; addition of tolbutamide blocks KB effects, highlighting KATP channel's role.

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.

Specifically, my research focuses on the mathematical problem-solving of expert mathematicians and differentiating the neurocognitive bases of heuristics and problem-solving techniques using fMRI methods. Further studies can then evaluate educational methods by measuring the change between subjects’ brain activation patterns and that of the expert models.

1. National Governors Association Center for Best Practices, Council of Chief State School Officers. Mathematics Standards. Common Core State Standards (National Governors Association Center for Best Practices, 2010).
2. OECD. The Survey of Adult Skills: Reader’s Companion, Second Edition. (OECD Publishing, 2016).
3. OECD. PISA 2015 Results (Volume V): Collaborative Problem Solving. (OECD Publishing, 2017).

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.

Yuan Zhang, Human Development & Family Sciences

Current Research: Currently, I am working on applying developmental frameworks: Family Stress Theory and Process Model of Parenting to explore how acculturative stress and parent-child acculturation gaps affect the behavioral and cognitive development of adolescents in Asian immigrant families. Under the supervision of Dr. Linda Halgunseth, I am working on the literature review of Asian parents’ parental behavior, cultural childrearing beliefs, and parental stress, and their associations with the use of hostile parenting. I am also in the progress of conducting a meta-analysis on immigrant parents’ acculturative stress and its influence on adolescents’ developmental outcomes. In addition, I am utilizing hierarchical linear modeling to analyze longitudinal data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS-K) to explore the influence of parent-child interactions on the developmental trajectories (growth curve) of Asian adolescents’ academic performance under the guidance of Dr. Eric Loken. Extending upon this HLM project, I am also using a structural equation model (SEM) to see if the frequency of parent-child interactions and adolescent self-esteem changes over time. Most recently, I am in the beginning stages of analyzing a dataset from a nation-wide longitudinal study on The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD). Using ABDC data, I am interested in examining the developmental consequences of Asian parents’ acculturation stress using HLM and structural equation model (SEM).

Summer Graduate Fellows 2018

IBACS Summer Graduate Fellowships provide three months of research funding to graduate students working on topics with relevance to the brain and cognitive sciences.

2018 Fellowship Recipients

Sumbleen Ali, Human Development and Family Studies

Current Research: I plan to investigate the neurobiology of interpersonal relationships looking at the brain’s functioning using fMRI. The research stems from Panksepp’s (1998) argument that brain mechanisms of distress in interpersonal relationships evolved from pain mechanisms of the brain. His argument was supported by Eisenberger (2003) who showed social rejection is painful and not a mere metaphor. She demonstrated an overlap in the neural circuitry involved in processing pain following both social rejection and physical pain. Currently, it is unknown if adults’ remembrances of parental acceptance-rejection in childhood may have piggybacked onto the threshold of the physical-pain system as well as onto sensitivity to social rejection in adulthood.

Given this void in information, my research proposes to investigate if differences exist in the neural correlates of social pain among young adults who remember having been rejected vs accepted (loved) by their parents in childhood. Results of this research will provide important information about the extent to which remembered childhood rejection influences brain functioning. Also adults who remember having been rejected as children tend to be more sensitive to possible interpersonal rejection than those who remember having been accepted. This research will also examine the extent to which rejection sensitivity is associated with brain functioning. The interdisciplinary nature of this research involves bridging family science and neurobiology.

Lauren Bryant, Psychology

Current Research: My dissertation focuses on the development of executive function (EF; higher-order processes that govern cognition and behavior) during early childhood. EFs are linked to numerous optimal outcomes, including school readiness and academic achievement. Existing research suggests that EFs with/without motivational components (whether children receive a reward based on performance) have different childhood outcomes and rely on different neural pathways. However, due to confounds in the existing methodology, it is not possible distinguish the effects of motivation and different task demands (e.g., language) on children's EF and/or associated outcomes. Furthermore, this work has largely ignored temperament (biologically-based individual differences in self-regulation), which varies with children's approach behaviors and sensitivity to reward. To better understand environmental and biological factors that underlie variations in child EF, I will investigate associations between EF, temperament, and reward by administering two comparable versions of the same Stroop-like task (i.e., with and without performance-contingent reward) and parent-report temperament measures. These methods will be drawn from the existing adult and animal literature on associations between reward, cognition, and behavior. Thus, my study will integrate developmental, cognitive, and emotional/motivational approaches to characterize associations between EF, motivation, and temperament with improved methodology.

Sarah Camera, Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences

Current Research:Currently, we are in the manuscript preparation stage of this project. While maintaining a full AuD course load and teaching, I've been writing a paper regarding the impact of noise exposure on noise tolerance, which will be submitted for review over winter break. I also have a co-authored paper in review currently. Next Spring, I will be finishing my AuD requirements and therefore not have much time to devote to research, but will be presenting at the American Academy of Audiology conference and meeting regularly with my advisor to review more literature and further develop ideas for the proposed research below. I hope to formalize it with support from the IBACS summer fellowship, begin pilot data collection in Fall 2018, and submit my grant application for the Dec. 8 winter deadline. Because I am concurrently pursuing an AuD and PhD, Fall 2018 is the first semester that I can fully focus my efforts on research, though I will be a 4th year grad student. While working on clinical doctorate requirements has slowed my research progress, I strongly believe that my audiology background allows me a valuable perspective on the intersection of clinical practice and basic hearing research that will strengthen my research with relevant and informative questions that will bridge these two professional worlds. Because my proposed project focuses on subclinical changes, I also may consider my research questions in terms of public health and obtain training in that discipline.

Kirsty Coulter, Psychology

Current Research: My interests lie in considering interdisciplinary approaches to understanding and improving outcomes in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). While intervention work primarily focuses on the behavioral presentation of ASD, considering the mechanisms underlying that behavior may help us to identify subgroups within ASD and provide more individualized treatment.

Before coming to UConn, I developed expertise in Event Related Potential (ERP; netting and behavioral management) paradigms while working with Chuck Nelson, Ph.D. My proposed research uses similar evoked visual ERP paradigms. Specifically, in conjunction with an NIH-funded project aimed at studying individuals previously diagnosed with ASD who achieved optimal outcome (OO; Fein et al., 2013), I propose to use ERP and behavioral judgements to assess multisensory integration abilities. This semester at UConn I have undergone training in appropriate diagnostic tools for ASD (ADOS-2), which are essential for this project, and have drawn out next-steps for this project.

Participants will be recruited starting May 2018; I will pilot and fine-tune the paradigm during Spring 2018 with participant pool subjects and will seek additional mentoring in predictive coding and EEG paradigm analysis. Speedy preparation and implementation of this project is necessary in order to capitalize on this opportunity to study individuals who offer a unique chance to investigate typical behavior and neural functioning after an early autism diagnosis.

Ben De Bari, Psychology

Current Research:I am continuing my work with the Physical Intelligence Lab, primarily furthering the investigation of a chemical dissipative system. I am working to understand the constraints and conditions leading to self-organization phenomena, and consequent behavioral modes, of a camphor-water system. In addition to this research project, I intend to build on the successes in utilizing the electrodynamic non-equilibrium system, as pioneered by James Dixon and Bruce Kay. In particular, I would like to continue the line of research investigating learning phenomena in non-equilibrium systems. These projects require utilization of ideas from thermodynamics, chemistry, biology, and psychology, integrating them into a non-traditional interdisciplinary methodology.

Zak Ekves, Psychology

Current Research: My current research plan is focused on further exploring the role of neural regions associated with episodic memory in the processing of events. My previous analyses have shown that when processing sentences that introduce a new object into the discourse ("He will chop the onion and then weigh another onion"), there is increased connectivity between regions in the left inferior frontal gyrus and hippocampus, compared to sentences that refer back to previously instantiated objects ("He will chop the onion and then weigh the onion"). I intend to conduct an equivalent experiment in the visual domain. This project will be relevant to two related bodies of literature. First, it’s suggested that the hippocampus is functionally divided along the anterior-posterior axis, such that anterior portions are biased towards more global, abstract representation while posterior regions are biased towards local representation (e.g. Poppenk et al., 2013). I predict that processing in language will recruit more anterior portions of the hippocampus (related to more abstract representation), while visual processing will recruit more posterior portions (related to more specified, fine-grained, local representation). Second, by comparing neural activation and connectivity across analogous visual and language event processing tasks, I will be able to tease apart which neural responses are correlates of event cognition proper, as opposed those in one particular domain.

Martin Flament-Fultot, Psychology

Current Research: One of the main areas of research in the philosophy of mind is intentionality. Current work in tensegrity robotics is partially addressing this topic by studying goal-directed locomotion. But intentionality is best manifested when systems entertain more than one goal and must flexibly accommodate their priorities. This happens in supra postural tasks, where an individual must do something, e.g. with their hands, while keeping their upright posture in balance. Limb movements alter the overall balance, but the balance must support the limb movements. My research focuses on embedding participants in force fields under supra postural tasks in order to analyze the kinematics of how participants control their entire posture while keeping their center of mass over their base of support. Degrees of freedom are expected to be organized by soft assembled patterns of mutual constraint. To assess the nature of these neuro-muscular soft assemblies, I am also further developing the virtual tensegrity model by designing neural networks with the help of genetic algorithms. The purpose of genetic algorithms is to efficiently explore the parameter space (e.g. the coupling matrix) of the network so as to reproduce dynamics equivalent to those observed in humans during postural tasks (e.g. ankle to hip strategy transitions for balance). Genetic algorithms can also help extract non-obvious, higher-order information from the state of the mechanical system that could be exploited efficiently.

Pam Fuhrmeister, Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences

Current Research: My current and upcoming work builds on themes from my previous work and additionally seeks to determine some of the sources of individual variability that is so frequently observed in phonetic learning studies. One study in progress looks at a wider age range of individuals in phonetic learning, including children (10-17 years). In this study, we want to explore critical period effects in perceptual learning of speech sounds and whether the same skills that facilitate speech sound learning in adulthood also predict successful learning in children. This project draws from developmental psychology and clinical speech literature, as some of the measures we are using have been implicated in language and reading disorders. In an upcoming project, we will establish whether structural brain differences (using voxel-based morphometry) and individual differences in structural connectivity (using DTI) predict overnight improvement in phonetic learning or differences in how native-language speech sounds are perceived (e.g., how “categorical” an individual’s perception is). Because previous work found differences in brain morphology in expert phoneticians, we expect that similar differences may also explain the vast individual variability typically observed in phonetic learning studies. As described in the proposed research section, my dissertation will determine the neural bases of generalization in phonetic learning using fMRI and will then validate this by testing people with aphasia.

Kyra Krass, Psychology

Current Research: I am currently investigating which object states are activated in the brain when hearing various events containing object state change. I have run the behavioral portion of an fMRI study. We administer an associative learning task to our participants over two days, and on day three, they perform a priming task. Our goal is to have participants learn pairs of objects states with faces and houses. For example, they would learn that a chopped onion is associated with faces and an intact onion is associated with houses. When placed in the scanner, we hope to distinguish between the object states activated given that they are now paired with distinct brain areas. Participants will hear sentences in three different conditions: 1) The woman will weigh the onion. 2) The woman will chop the onion. 3) The woman will weigh the chopped onion. We predict that individuals will activate an intact onion when hearing weigh, an intact and chopped onion when hearing chop, and a chopped onion when hearing weigh the chopped onion. My second line of research I will submit for a grant. I am interested in determining what individual difference measures can predict performance in a visual world task. We will use tasks that measure executive functioning (EF), and we will test monolingual and bilingual individuals to see if EF or second language knowledge are measures that can account for differences in performance on a visual world task. This research merges linguistics, psychology, and neuroscience.

Timothy McKay, Human Development and Family Studies

Current Research: I am currently working under the supervision of Dr. Ryan Watson in exploring topics relevant to minority stress in LGBTQ populations. Specifically, I am studying the impact of gender minority stress in transgender and gender nonconforming individuals (TGNC) as it relates to their cognitive processes and mental health. Specifically, I will be examining rates of depression and substance use in reference to cognition (i.e., decision-making) and degree of gender identity disclosure to family and friends in TGNC populations. Recently, I was accepted to present a poster with Dr. Watson at the American Educational Research Association Conference in April, 2018. I will be presenting trends and disparities in school-based mental health behavior between LGBT and heterosexual student populations in British Columbia, CA. The data examined within our poster presentation is also referenced in a paper that I recently co-authored with Dr. Watson titled: Mental health issues among lesbian, gay and bisexual adolescents: Changing inequalities in Canada, which is currently under review for publication in a leading LGBTQ-focused journal. I am also a funded research assistant on a national LGBTQ Teen Youth Study where I am responsible for managing, analyzing, and tracking data use and ongoing manuscripts. The findings from my work on the LGBTQ teen youth study, along with supervision and collaboration with Dr. Watson, have been instrumental in preparing me for this fellowship.

Natali Naveh, Molecular and Cellular Biology

Current Research: The formation of spines on neuronal dendrites in early development has been linked to learning and memory retention. In the Cux2-null neurons, Xlr3b and Xlr4b were found to be upregulated and, upon introduction of an Xlr shRNA, the phenotype was rescued. In other cell types, Satb1 and Xlr3 were observed to co-localize. This may suggest a role for Xlr3b to act with Satb1 in a Cux2-regulated pathway to mediate the regulation of dendrite spine growth. This phenotype, or Xlr3’s function may contribute to behavioral phenotypes related to those observed in TS. Firstly, Golgi Cox staining will be performed to examine dendrite branching in the context of the Xlr3 knock down. Secondly, as TS is accompanied by poor reversal learning and social cognition, the contribution of Xlr3b to mouse behavior, including these phenotypes, will be determined. This will be carried out with the assistance of the University of Connecticut Murine Behavioral Neurogenetics Facility (MBNF) to test for social and repetitive behaviors. Transgenic males and XMO TS females will be tested, as these groups show elevated Xlr3b expression, worse social cognition, and worse reversal learning compared to wild type females. Lastly, as Xlr3b expression is higher in neonates compared to adults, performing RNA-seq on brains from P0 and adult mice will help identify genes with which Xlr3 interacts or for which Xlr3 may affect regulation respectively.

Emma Nguyen, Linguistics

Current Research: The goal of my current research is to leverage P600 satiation to test syntactic theories. My previous research has shown that satiation does not occur when there are multiple violations that are categorically distinct from each other at both a grammatical and sentence processing level. The next step is to test violations that are distinct at a grammatical level, but are similar at the level of sentence processing (both first-pass dynamics and reanalysis). By holding sentence processing properties constant, we can ask how similar violations must be at a grammatical level to induce satiation.

In the next set of experiments, I will systematically manipulate the syntactic similarity of the violations, while holding sentence processing properties as constant as possible. For example, the first experiment will compare two violations that differ at a very fine-grained syntactic level, but share many sentence processing properties (both are island violations, both are embedded questions, both occur at clause boundaries, both involve wh-items, etc.)

(1) Wh-island: *What do you wonder [who read]?
(2) Weather-island: *What do you wonder [whether Mary read]?

In future experiments, we will test violations that differ more substantially at a syntactic level (such as whether islands versus complex noun-phrase islands), until we fully characterize the level of similarity that satiation requires. We can then compare the resulting patterns to specific claims in syntactic theories.

Emily Peters, Psychology

Current Research: My research is interdisciplinary in nature, in that it combines methods in order to answer questions in the fields of neurobiology of language, cognitive science, behavioral neuroscience, and translational clinical research. In addition, findings can translate across research and clinical domains.

My current research at UConn explores the relationship between language processing, social cognition, and social functioning outcomes in schizophrenia. I am investigating the hypothesis that social cognitive deficits develop through a neurologically-based language processing impairment, and that deficits in social cognition lead to social withdrawal and impairment in schizophrenia. My master's thesis project combines a TMS-EEG paradigm with neuropsychological testing to explore both the neurological bases of language processing and functional outcomes associated with impairments. Participants are recruited from a local Intensive Outpatient Program.

This project aims to demonstrate that social functioning and social cognitive deficits in schizophrenia are related to impairments in language processing. If language processing impairments in the brain are related to functional outcomes, then it will be important to examine the relatedness of these symptoms through the development of schizophrenia. In addition, a better understanding of impairments in sz may offer new ideas for future interventions, such as targeting language processing as a method of improving social functioning.

Adam Rainear, Communication

Current Research: Most of my current research has examined how humans interact with new communication technologies when risks are communicated through these tools. Our early research indicates that when being provided a risk message, robotic platforms may cause individuals to retain less information and may be no more or less effective than traditional media platforms. Our most recent robot data collection led to a brief presentation at the American Meteorological Society Conference, and a top paper award at the National Communication Association. In the coming months, we plan to further explore the measured variables to understand how involvement, credibility judgements, or feelings of mediated presence may influence outcomes and behavior (among others). Moving forward, I hope to continue to connect both physical and social science by exploring the relationships between using new technology to communicate and understanding how these platforms may influence individual information processing and decision-making. My experience in last summer’s IBACS workshop was the most useful experience of my graduate career, having taken an idea in my head and turning it into an external grant proposal in only 4 months. While the first proposal was not funded, the agency offered me an opportunity to revise the submission, and there are hopes of utilizing this smaller developmental money to springboard the idea into a larger future grant.

Elizabeth Simmons, Psychology

Current Research: I am currently engaged in several studies; below are the ones most germane to the IBACS mission.

Project 1: Hyperlexia. With Drs. Magnuson (Cognitive Psychology), Eigsti (Clinical Psychology), and Grigorenko (Baylor College of Medicine, Genetics) we are evaluating the neural correlates of reading ability in typically developing children and those with ASD with and without hyperlexia (precocious decoding ability). We hypothesize that unusual patterns of cognitive and social development in ASD result, in part, from atypical connectivity between brain areas supporting various functions and reward circuitry. This study uses a combination of neurophysiological methods (fMRI), behavioral methods (eye tracking, clinical assessment) along with collection of genetic information to better understand this complex disorder.

Project 2: The development of fine-grained spoken word recognition. I plan to downward extend my master’s thesis work evaluating spoken word recognition in preschool children to a younger group (infants and toddlers). This will likely require a faculty member from developmental psychology (potentially Drs. Sheya or Suanda) and child language expert (Dr. Rhea Paul, Sacred Heart University, Speech-Language Pathology) in order to ensure our tasks are appropriate for infants and toddlers. We will also begin to investigate how very young children learn words that compete, phonologically and semantically, using an artificial lexicon task and eye tracking.

Charles Wasserman, Psychology

Current Research: Currently, I have just completed an EEG study looking a beat-perception in complex rhythms (this will be my Masters thesis work). This work uses 32 channel EEG (and additional EMG) along with behavioral tasks in order to look at behavioral and electrophysiological responses to complex musical rhythms. It is possible to create a rhythm with no spectral energy at the pulse frequency by manipulating the number of events that occur anti-phase (180°) versus in-phase (0°) with the basic rhythmic cycle. Dynamical analysis predicts neural oscillation will emerge at such a “missing” pulse frequency. The current experiment utilized four different rhythms of varying complexity (1 simple, 2 complex, and 1 random). Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) of the Hilbert envelope showed energy at the repetition frequency (2Hz) for the simple rhythm, but no spectral energy at the missing pulse frequency (2Hz) for the complex rhythms. EEG responses to these stimuli were recorded to look for the neural oscillations and power modulations at the missing pulse frequency predicted by dynamical analysis. We have found evidence of a 2Hz response in the EEG to missing pulse rhythms. These data support the theory that rhythmic synchrony occurs as the result of an emergent population oscillation that entrains at this particular frequency.

Emily Wyckoff, Psychology

Current Research: I am developing manuscripts for my thesis and research previously presented at conferences and am on target to submit several manuscripts within the next six months on topics related to accuracy of self-reported weight, the home environment (i.e. chaos and foods in the home), weight suppression as a predictor of weight loss treatment outcomes, and qualitative research on diabetes management. Additionally, as a graduate research assistant at Yale University, in addition to clinical treatment and assessment of patients with Binge Eating Disorder (BED), I am collaborating with Dr. Carlos Grillo (Psychiatry) and colleagues on a manuscript examining clinical characteristics of patients with BED. I am also currently a graduate assistant for a NIH funded weight loss maintenance trial (PI Tricia Leahey, Allied Health Sciences) and am spearheading development of intervention content for an online weight loss program. With my advisor (Amy Gorin), I am working to obtain seed funding to add measures to the weight loss maintenance trial which would further examine the influence of executive functioning and the home environment on weight loss maintenance and allow us to test Temporal Self-Regulation Theory in the context of weight loss maintenance. The proposed research below builds on research proposals for which I received the APAGS/ Psi Chi Junior Scientist Fellowship, the Christine N. Witzel Award, and honorable mention for the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.

Xiao Yang, Psychology

Current Research: Currently, I am working on applying graph theory on resting state MRI data analysis. Specifically, I am utilizing hierarchical clustering algorithm (average linkage method) for resting MRI data analysis to study the functional connectivity changes in reading network and language network in aphasia patients after treatment. Extending upon my machine learning project, I am also using a machine learning algorithm called multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) to identify brain regions that can be used as a biomarker to differentiate optimal and less effective speech treatment.

Emily Yearling, Psychology

Current Research: Goal directed behavior requires us to interact with our environment in a way that is concurrent with our internal states and motivations and flexible to environmental changes.While we might have a clear goal in mind, there is not always a clear path to it.The path is in flux as the environment and our own internal states vary.We propose that the spatial-temporal dynamics of the task, not just the logic or goal, influences the development of the cognitive system.To show this, we designed a video game like task to manipulate spatial-temporal dynamics of typical cognitive control tasks for young children. We will submit an IRB and BIRC seed grant by the end of the semester.The grant will enable us to obtain a neural characterization of the developmental changes in cognitive control due to the spatial and temporal dynamics of tasks. Based on our goals, we are attuned to specific aspects of individual objects and the categorical characteristics of the object. We propose that tracking the histories of objects allows us to direct our behavior to achieve a goal.To observe the effect of interaction and language on object perception, we have a video game like task appropriate for 2 to 6 year olds that requires one to track the individual histories of identical objects.The key manipulations are the are how object is labeled and how the participant interacts with the object. This allows us to observe changes in how language and the action system track object histories across development.

Summer Graduate Fellows 2017

IBACS Summer Graduate Fellowships provide three months of research funding to graduate students working on topics with relevance to the brain and cognitive sciences.

2017 Fellowship Recipients

Alexandria Battison, Physiology & Neurobiology

Current Research:  My research fits into IBaCS mission as it is inherently interdisciplinary; combining neuroscience experimental methods with mathematical and computer programming analysis methods. I was fortunate during my undergraduate career to have an interdisciplinary background, and my goal for my graduate work is to continue to bring engineering and physics into my neuroscience dissertation research. Most of my analysis work is taken from biomedical engineering and math and is applied to analyzing cortical firing patterns. I hope to push my research forward and continue to optimize my experimental methods in a way that will pull from physics and engineering.

Mary Baumgartner, Physiology & Neurobiology

Current Research: At its core, my research is focused on understanding the molecular regulatory programs underlying normal cortical development and cortical function. As a result, my research project is intrinsically interdisciplinary, spanning the fields of molecular biology, developmental biology, neuroscience, and behavioral sciences, and initiating extensive collaborations both within and between departments is necessary to answer the questions at the heart of my project. In addition to the broad range of approaches I am employing, a key resource at my disposal is a conditional knockout mouse line, in which I can target a minor spliceosome component for removal in specific tissues. Using this mouse line, I can separately parse out how minor splicing informs cortical development, and how this altered development impacts cortical function, and how minor splicing regulates the function of mature neurons. Subsequent use of comprehensive behavioral testing paradigms can then be used to elucidate whether the functions of specific cortical regions/circuits, such as those underlying attention and motor activity, are differentially sensitive to shifts in minor splicing-controlled gene expression.

Pietro Cerrone, Linguistics

Current Research: I conceive my interests in theoretical and experimental Morphology and its interfaces as a part of Cognitive Science. My ultimate goal is to contribute to the understanding of the language faculty and its processing, which requires interdisciplinary work, in particular, with cognitive psychologists and speech perception scientists, and, in general, with scholars whose research deals with how the human brain represents and processes language. I am currently involved in an speech perception and production project with Andrea Calabrese whose goal is to understand how English monolinguals categorize speech sounds of Polish and how they produce them.

Jessicas Contreras, Psychology

Current Research: Jessica is a deaf 1st year doctoral student in developmental psychology. She is interested in neurodiversity and how american sign language contribute to cognitive devopment. She is interesting in how language experience shape cognitive systems such as executive function and number development.

Ashley Dhaim, Psychology

Current Research: My research is focused on how action in a social context promotes the creation of a social coordination between individuals. I'm interested in how these dynamics change with experience and development between the ages of 3 and 10 years old and what implications they have on the development of higher level social cognition.

Akie Fujita, Biomedical Engineering & Physiology and Neurobiology

Current Research: My project is directed at characterizing the functional properties of a population of inhibitory neurons in the lateral hypothalamic area. These neurons have been implicated in the control of arousal, reward and feeding but their cellular and circuit-level properties are poorly understood.  Using a combination of electrophysiology, neuroanatomy, optogenetics and behavioral techniques, I will take a multidisciplinary approach to uncovering their electrical and neuromodulatory signatures, anatomical projections and role in homeostatic behavior.

Ryosuke Hattori, Linguistics

Current Research: This project uses the Intermodal Preferential Looking task on English-learning children, to seek a support for the “parametric” hypothesis, where positive setting of certain abstract parameters is considered to be prerequisite for two or more related constructions. It is my interest to find out if children’s comprehension level on these related constructions correlates with each other.

Lu Li, Mechanical Engineering

Current Research: We propose a 3D spatially heterogeneous neural tissue model of cortical motor neuron disease by co-culturing cortical and spinal motor neurons. We develop a bioprinting approach to precisely assemble neuron encapsulating gel blocks into 3D complex co-culture environment, which will offer an innovative system to study the role of target-derived signal on the development of cortical motor neurons in 3D and develop a better understanding of pathogenic mechanisms and identifying therapeutic targets for cortical motor neuron diseases.

Andre Lindsey, Speech, Language & Hearing Sciences

Current Research: My research is aimed at determining how language interacts with other domains of cognition and to determine how neurological injury affects that interaction. Consistent with the mission IBACS, the goal is a more comprehensive understanding of neurological functioning.

Maurici Lopez-Felip, Psychology

Current Research: My research project focuses on how the context in team sports influences the behavior of actors at both individual and collective-levels. The goals of this project are 1) to develop a model of multi-agent coordination and 2) to use this model to make testable predictions about player performance as it relates to perception-action and cognitive processes.  In a more advanced stage of the project, we will assess the the model's ability to predict catastrophic events (e.g., injuries, collisions, etc.).

Jin Lu, Computer Science and Engineering

Current Research: Schizophrenia and many other mental disorders are associated with impairment of working memory. Recent studies have identified a limited number of regions among which the brain network connectivity modulates working memory. However, other possible regions remain lack of thorough investigation. To build a valid memory model rather than merely correlation analysis, we plan to develop a machine learning approach to analyze brain network connectivity in individuals under different states (rest, n-back) by integrative modeling of fMRI images, EEG signals and cognitive survey variables.

Monica Ly, Psychology

Current Research: My current and proposed research would bridge clinical psychology and neuroscience, two fields that would gain tremendously from interaction rather than separation. By conducting this translational research, I hope to help set the groundwork for future research using simultaneous EEG-fMRI in topics that were previously limited by the incomplete neural picture provided by a single technique alone. The direct results of this work will help researchers select the system appropriate to their design and goals. The proposed research could incorporate aspects of bioengineering, cognitive neuroscience, neuropsychology, and clinical psychology. I hope to collaborate with faculty in both the clinical and behavioral neuroscience divisions as well as BIRC faculty to integrate their perspectives to evaluate the scope and use of innovative neuroimaging technologies.

Shireena McGee, Psychology

Current Research: I aim to expand my research across traditional interdisciplinary sciences, incorporating research in learning, dynamical systems, education and the brain. I believe these fields are pertinently in-orthogonal in my line of work and must be mutually informative in order to find success in any one endeavor. Innovations in education are hidden in developmental psychology and neuroscience and it is my goal to work towards nurturing these interdisciplinary connections in order to make an impact on the way that the world receives and communicates information in diverse learning contexts.

Ashley Parker, Speech, Language & Hearing Sciences

Current Research: This project will examine concept formation in children with specific language impairment. The purpose of the study is to examine the dependency of language on the development of concept formation in children. Concept organization is critical in order to understand and identify the things we encounter in the world, and two examples of such organizational structure are taxonomic and thematic categories. The hypothesis is that if concept formation is dependent on language abilities, then we would expect children with SLI to be at a less mature stage of concept formation due to their deficit in language. Our research seeks to find if a shift to a taxonomic preference occurs in children with language impairment, as it does in typically developing school-aged children. If significant differences are found, this study will help us to explain children with language impairment’s delay in language acquisition.

Peter Perrino, Psychological Sciences

Current Research: An individual inherits many fundamental processes that form complex cognitive systems that are required for the development of language. It is believed that genetics play a pivotal role in the acquisition and retention of language and disruptions in genetic mechanisms have shown to cause language impairments, as seen in dyslexia and autism. We aim to target specific genes that have been implicated in language disorders and assess the behavioral and neuroanatomical consequences of manipulating the protein products associated with the genes via the use of transgenic mouse models. We can assess these models on various intermediate language phenotypes such as auditory processing and working memory. Following behavioral testing, we can investigate various neural substrates that may be underlying any anomalies observed, to further understand the gene-brain-behavior relationship. With the help of IBACS, the completion of our work will provide valuable insight to our understanding of the biological substrates of atypical language development. Future applications of data could allow for the development of early screening tools to identify at risk individuals as well as more targeted interventions using these genetic and anatomical markers.

Roberto Petrosino, Linguistics

Current Research: My current work is looking at ERP response to marked/non-marked and linguistic/non-linguistic sounds. Markedness is a broad concept that encodes how much frequent and complex a cognitive object is. As dealing with such a broad dimension, this project will provide new evidence on the role of markedness in encoding and analyzing sounds, and may ultimately be of broad interest to cognitive scientists working on speech perception across domains.

Adam Rainear, Communication

Current Research: My proposed research will focus on the factors which would promote safe and proper evacuation behavior in times of weather risks and crises. Using virtual reality, I hope to gain an understanding of what might enhance or impede safe evacuation, examine how new communication tools might influence risk messsage perception, and understand how individuals are processing and considering weather warnings under times of duress.

Jenelle Salisbury, Philosophy

Current Research: My research is centered around the issue of “the unity of consciousness” in philosophy of mind. The current project aims to explore what the neuroscience of information integration in the semantic representation network can bring to bear on this topic. In particular, I am interested in the neural mechanisms underlying information integration (questions such as whether integration requires a hub). This is relevant to explaining the kind of unity required for joint accessibility, and I also aim to explore its relevance to the kind of unity required for joint phenomenology.

Vivi Tecoulesco, Psychology

Current Research: In my research I am using ABRs to measure subcortical responses to and I am also using behavioral measures to map the language learning process. Letty Naigles in Developmental Psychology is my advisor; the goal of our research is to address how children with ASD learn language. She encouraged me to incorporate neural structure and function into my work. To that end I have been working with Erika Skoe to add ABR to my toolbox.
I am really interested in trying to bridge so called lower level subcortical processing with higher level, representational levels of language. In my opinion this is in line with the mission of IBACS. Additionally, as a trainee in the NBL program I am demonstrating my commitment to interdisciplinary work. Affiliating with IBACS with increase my opportunities to find projects to both join and/or initiate that strive to incorporate multiple perspectives as I believe our understanding of the brain and cognitive functioning is extremely more likely in this collaborative environment.

I plan to help the community by being open for collaboration, willingness to discuss my work and that of others, and hopefully doing good science that reflects well on the community.

Ryan Troha, Psychology

Current Research: The Connecticut Institute for Brain and Cognitive Sciences places a lot of focus on research integrating different scientific disciplines. I will accomplish this by combining social behavior research with electrophysiology and neurophysiology. Observational learning has been seen in humans, but lacks a behavioral paradigm that can measure this phenomenon in other animals. I am working towards developing such a paradigm which will then allow further investigation into the electrophysiological and neurobiological components underlying this important form of learning.

Given this great opportunity, I will work my hardest to fulfill the Institute’s goals. This means not only working to expand my personal research expertise but to also teach those around me, cross disciplinary boundaries, and promote the Institute’s research activities. I am excited to make the most of this opportunity granted to me by the Institute and take advantage of any chance to learn from others, teach others, and to build the research environment here at the University of Connecticut!

Yi Wei, Psychology

Current Research: I'm interested in auditory perception and processing in clinical population, particularly people with aphasia. I'm also interested in how auditory perception and processing can be used to help this population in their progress of recovery by innovate/modify/individualize current music therapy techniques.

Summer Graduate Fellows 2016

IBACS Summer Graduate Fellowships provide three months of research funding to graduate students working on topics with relevance to the brain and cognitive sciences.

2016 Fellowship Recipients

Linda Boshans, Physiology & Neurobiology

Current Research: My research focuses on the neurogenic fate potential of NG2 cells, a type of glial progenitor cell. NG2 cells share a close lineage with interneurons, and through forced expression of a pro-interneuronal transcription factor, NG2 cells can be reprogrammed into neurons. Specifically, I am interested in the genetic and molecular changes that occur to produce the fate switch of NG2 cells into GABAergic neurons.

Thomas Brooks, Psychology

Current Research: I am interested in the interplay between perception, action, and cognition, particularly with regards to how sensory information creates experience. I like to take classical experimental phenomena (such as bistable perception of the Necker cube) and reconceptualize them as action-driven processes. Currently I'm studying how grasping a cube shaped object in different ways can affect which orientation of Necker cube is seen by a person.

Iris Chin, Psychology

Current Research: My research interest is in language acquisition in typically developing children and children with autism spectrum disorder. I focus on four aspects of language acquisition: how do children come to acquire morphosyntax (in terms of its form and its meaning), what types of biases do children have when learning the syntax of their language, how does the acquisition of language impact other areas of cognition (i.e., theory of mind), and how do children learn about the pragmatic use of language.

Amanda Coletti, Physiology and Neurobiology

Current Research: My research focuses on characterization of stem cell niches in the developing brain. Specifically, I am examining fate decisions of stem cells that promote neurogenesis, ependymogenesis or regeneration, in the case of injury or disease. I am particularly interested in how hydrocephalus affects brain development.

Charles Davis, Psychology

Current Research: How is meaning represented in the brain? I am interested in semantic representation in language, and the neural circuits that support these representations. My current work is investigating the representation of abstract concepts, looking at the interaction of semantic and episodic memory in the processing of abstract concepts, and the role of the hippocampus in this relation. I am also interested in the distributed representation of semantic memory across sensorimotor areas of the brain (the extent to which sensory, perceptual, and motor areas are involved in processing language), and how these ideas map onto language creation and, from an evolutionary perspective, non-human communication.

Julia Drouin, Speech Language & Hearing Sciences

Current Research: I'm interested in speech perception and how listeners map from speech to meaning. That is how is the listener able to take information from the acoustic speech signal and map it onto higher linguistic units, especially given that the acoustic signal is rich in variability. I use behavioral paradigms, electrophysiology, and neuroimaging techniques to examine these questions.

Zak Ekves, Psychology

Current Research: Semantic and episodic memory integration during sentence processing, Event processing and representation, Neural correlates of event processing and semantic/episodic memory integration.

Katelyn Gettens, Psychology

Current Research: My research interests lie at the intersection of health psychology, neuropsychology, and neurophysiology. My work focuses on the neuropsychological and neurophysiological underpinnings of health behavior change. My current work examines the relationship between executive functions (verbal fluency, mental flexibility, inhibition, planning, etc.) and weight control among adult populations with overweight and obesity using behavioral, task-based neuropsychological assessment batteries.

Roman Goz, Psychology

Current Research: Epileptic spectrum disorders affects millions of people around the world. Related genetic malfunction has been found only for a very small part of those epileptic disorders.Epilepsy might also follow traumatic injury. The changes in electrophysiological properties of neuronal tissue that makes it hyper-excitable, creating a synchronous firing either in a small brain area, or that spreads to multiple brain areas, are still enigma. I'm interested in discovering the answer to that. Understanding what neuronal circuit initiate this synchronous activity, whether there is an origin in a specific cell type is the current goal.

Henry Harrison, Psychology

Current Research: Visually guided action; behavioral dynamics; action-selection; self-organization; sports science.

Kavitha Kannan, Molecular & Cellular Biology

Current Research: I am interested in studying the molecular mechanisms behind neurodegenerative disease progression using Drosophila melanogaster as a model organism. My current research uses genetic tools available in Drosophila combined with cellular and molecular biology approaches to identify novel genetic modifiers that play key roles in in human neurodegenerative diseases.

Martin Lang, Anthropology

Current Research: My primary interest is ritual and effects of its various components on human behavior. I study effects of music on inter-personal coordination, synchronous movement, decision-making and social bonding. My other research line is focused on understanding the role that ritualized motor sequences might play in alleviating anxiety. I use physiological measurements, motion capture, machine-learning algorithms, and linear and nonlinear data analysis (recurrence quantification analysis).

Tommy Lee, Psychology

Current Research: Tommy Lee is interested in the mechanisms underlying learning and memory in the dorsal and ventral regions of the hippocampus. His research is interdisciplinary—integrating behavior, neuropharmacology, electrophysiology, and computational neuroscience. After completing his Ph.D. and a postdoctoral fellowship, Tommy Lee aspires to be a professor of neuroscience at a research I university to continue his research and teaching.

Natasza Marrouch, Psychology

Current Research: My primary research focuses on the processing of unpredictability. Building on interdisciplinary postulates from information theory, probability theory, and neurological findings, I explore the role of unpredictability in the formation and persistence of belief systems. To this end I apply a combination of experimental methods, computational modeling, and multilevel analysis of open-source socioeconomic, Geo-spatial data, and individual level data.

Gabriel Martinez-Vera, Linguistics

Current Research: Semantics, Morphosyntax, Syntax-Semantics Interface

Timothy Michaels, Psychology

Current Research: My research utilizes translational and interdisciplinary methods to examine the neural basis of perceptual and cognitive deficits that underlie serious mental illness. Specifically, I am interested in understanding how attention and working memory impairments relate to psychosis and contribute to the pathophysiology of schizophrenia.

Glenn Milton, Molecular & Cellular Biology

Current Research: We are interested in X chromosome evolution in respect to disease, particularly Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). As an epigenetics lab, we are interested in the epigenetic environment and the role it plays in gene regulation on the X chromosome. We aim to define the chromatin architecture of an X-linked imprinting control region in mice and to define expression and regulation of an ASD candidate gene in human brain tissue.

Yanina Prystauka, Psychology

Current Research: Are brain regions recruited for processing object state changes sensitive to the number of dimensions on which the change occurs? What is the effect of processing identical syntactic structures with different levels of semantic complexity on the working memory load? Do native and L2 speakers have similar mechanisms of morphosyntactic processing? I use converging evidence from psycholinguistics and syntax to study sentence processing and its neural correlates.

Russell Ritchie, Psychology

Current Research: My interests include cognitive science most broadly, language more specifically, and most specifically, language dynamics (processing, acquisition, emergence in communities, historical change, evolution in our species). I mostly investigate these dynamics in the lexicon and in prosody, using behavioral and neurophysiological experiments, corpus analysis, and computational modeling. I also maintain interests in data science and natural language processing.

Brenda Rourke, Communication

Current Research: My research is broadly focused on information processing in mediated environments for atypical populations. I am specifically interested in cognitive processing differences in mediated learning for individuals with high functioning autism and attention deficit disorders. My work draws from research in education, psychology, communication, telecommunication, engineering, and cognitive science.

Kayleigh Ryherd, Psychology

Current Research:I am interested in how an individual’s semantic representations and knowledge about concepts affect their reading comprehension ability. Specifically, I’m interested in poor comprehenders, people who show a specific impairment in language comprehension without problems in word decoding or other more general cognitive processes. I use behavioral and neuroimaging methodologies to try to understand the specific comprehension deficit in this population.

Garrett Smith, Psychology

Current Research: Sentence processing, particularly the effects meaning has on syntactic form; Nonlinear dynamics and self-organization in language and cognition; Computational modeling.