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Effects of Acute and Chronic Inflammation on Vasopressin Expression in the Paraventricular Nucleus of the Hypothalamus

2019-12 , Patel, Shivany

Inflammation can lead to a suite of behavioral changes known as sickness behaviors, which have been implicated in the etiology of chronic inflammatory disease. Here, we examine the role of acute and chronic induction of inflammation on vasopressin (AVP) expression in the paraventricular nucleus of the hypothalamus (PVN) of female mice. To test, adult female C57B6/J mice were injected with lipopolysaccharide (LPS) at two different dosages and schedules to induce acute (1.0mg/kg, once) and chronic (0.25mg/kg LPS, eight times) inflammatory responses. The acute dose has previously been demonstrated to induce sickness behaviors, as measured by the open field test and a social interaction test; however, these measures were unaffected by the chronic administration of LPS. AVP mRNA expression in the PVN was measured using fluorescent in situ hybridization (FISH) and fluorescent microscopy. Both the acute and chronic administration of LPS resulted in an increase in PVN AVP expression without a change in the area of this expression. This increase in AVP in the PVN occurred despite the lack of sickness behavior, suggesting that further work is necessary to characterize the role of AVP in the PVN in these chronic and acute inflammatory responses.

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Brain Mechanisms for the Cognitive Effects of Narrative Persuasion

2017-05 , Nguyen, Tiffany Van Nhi

The ability of a narrative to transport individuals, or converge focus of attentional, emotional, and sensory resources to events in the narrative world, has been shown to lead to attitude and behavior changes. Proposed cognitive mechanisms behind narrative’s effect on persuasion include recollective detail, retrieval fluency, and inhibition of counter-arguing that are encouraged during transportation. Though past research has begun to demonstrate that activation in brain regions responsible for both emotional arousal and executive control lead to subsequent attitude and behavioral changes there have been no neuroimaging studies on narrative persuasion. In our study two participant samples were exposed to 24 text-based messages, either all with or without a narrative context. The behavioral sample read and rated the messages on their persuasive strength, emotional appeal, and logical appeal; while the fMRI sample listened only rated persuasive strength. We observed strong (vs. weak) persuasive messages evoke significantly more activity in the precuneus and middle frontal gyrus bilaterally. Greater activity was exhibited in the precuneus, medial frontal gyrus, anterior cingulate cortex, and right supramarginal gyrus for high (vs. low) emotional appeal messages. The overlap of activation in the middle frontal regions may imply that past research has confounded emotional appeal and persuasive strength, especially considering emotional appeal was normalized between strong vs. weak persuasive messages, but weak messages were perceived as more persuasive when enfolded in a narrative context. Further research to distinguish narrative features will help contribute to the understanding of persuasion and the role of affective reactions in influencing attitudes.

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Technology Constraints on Nonverbal Aspects of Communication

2013-05-08 , Han, Michelle

Communication involves more than just verbal speech; there are nonverbal aspects of communication such as body position, eye contact, hand gestures, and the like. Specifically in an interview setting, both the person conducting the interview and the person answering questions display their own methods of communication both verbal and nonverbal. When technology is introduced into the situation, changes in interviewer-interviewee interaction influence the interview process, the outcome, and even the aftermath. Even just the presence of a technological device, as opposed to pen and paper or the absence of a note-taking aid, could potentially alter the subjective interview experience. Understanding the tradeoff between these objective and subjective variables would be very useful. Research indicates that electronic documentation can lead to an increase in documentation and accuracy of recording. Research on the constraints of technology on nonverbal aspects of communication has been done in the Georgia Tech Sonification Lab. An investigation of a patient’s perception of a doctor after a medical interview as a consequence of different note-taking methods was conducted. In order to explore the critical interaction between doctors and patients, different note-taking methods were employed. The results were that the patients perceived the desktop computer to be the least favorable technology used by the doctor, which is applicable to society since computers are becoming more common in medical interviews (Olsheski & Walker, 2011). However, previous work on this topic did not take into account the factor of eye gaze or personality which is what the present study considered. Also, this study explored an interview involving a roommate situation, which could be applied to other interview-type situations or interactions.

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The Neural Correlates of Within Category Competition for Visual Representation

2011-05-09 , Chung, Andy

Electroencephalography (EEG) was used to study the mechanisms of categorical perception in neurologically-normal participants. Inferring from previous studies, the N1 component of the event related potential (ERP) was explored in search of evidence of competition in the brain for visual representation. The amplitude of the N1 component may be reduced when an object is presented visually in the context of other objects of the same perceptual category. Being able to identify competition that occurs within categories of objects and not in-between objects provides a novel and powerful tool to study categorization in the intact brain. In this study, stimuli from different object categories (shoes, bonsai trees, and butterflies) were presented in the context of either objects from the same category, objects from different categories, or non-object images. The results show that there is a significant difference between the same flanker conditions and the scrambled flanker conditions which provides evidence to suggest that specific pools of neurons code for each specific categories of objects. The methods described in this study may be used in future studies to investigate categorization using competition which relieves the requirement of depending on visual agnosia patients to study competition.

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How Cognitive Load Difficulty Affects Cognitive Mapping and Individual Differences in Navigation

2019-12 , Churaman, Tanya

In order to study the effects of varying the levels of cognitive load and individual differences upon cognitive mapping, forty-eight young adults participated in this virtual navigation study. To compare different levels of cognitive load, half of the participants trained in an Abstract Virtual Environment (low cognitive load) while the other half trained in a Realistic Virtual Environment (high cognitive load). After the training, participants were exposed to a series of navigational and pointing tasks to analyze the effects of the training environments – the different levels of cognitive load. It was observed that Abstraction was beneficial to participants in the training phase for the pointing task. In addition, in the testing phase, there was a noticeable trend of Abstraction also being beneficial for some of the pointing and navigational tasks. However, in one of the navigational tasks in the testing phase, Abstraction was shown to be more beneficial to those with a high spatial working memory. Thus, a lower cognitive load via Abstraction can be beneficial to navigation and creating a cognitive map. Further research should be conducted in which varying levels of Abstraction (cognitive load) is combined with other visual design elements, such as Translucency, in order to analyze if a conjunction of other variables alongside with cognitive load could potentially increase spatial abilities in individuals.

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Impact of Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation on Leadership Emergence in Teams

2016-07-18 , Nandagopal, Bharathwaj

This paper explores the relationship between motivation (intrinsic & extrinsic) and leadership emergence in order to mitigate extreme (too much or too little) leadership claiming and granting. The study examines DeRue and Ashford’s (2010) research, in addition to a host of other research articles, to hypothesize that intrinsic motivation is positively correlated to leadership claiming, while extrinsic motivation is positively correlated to leadership granting. The participants of this study are college students who have registered for course based credit at a midsize southeastern university. Each participant will join a team (three individuals per team), four teams per session. The four aforementioned teams will work as part of a larger problem-solving group to plan a civil infrastructure project in a fictitious developing nation. Before and throughout the study (at various time points), surveys will be administered that will collect information on motivation and leadership measures. After conducting analysis on the data, if the results support the aforementioned hypotheses, then extreme leadership claiming and granting can be mitigated by optimizing the amount of intrinsically and extrinsically motivated individuals on the team.

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Observing Negative Events at Work and Their Relationship to Job Stress and Well-Being

2013-05-08 , Dixon, Aurora J.

Although changes in employment status have long been recognized as important life events in relation to psychological well-being (e.g. Holmes & Rahe, 1967), there has historically been a deficit in research on additional work events. In 2012, Kanfer and her graduate students developed a scale, the Work Events Inventory (WEI), in order to assess work events individually. This study built upon the WEI in order to include observed events as well as direct events, and examined the relationship between experience of these events and different work-related outcomes, specifically job stress and well-being. Results indicated the potential of the WEI to be used as a tool for investigating work events and the importance of taking vicarious experiences into account in these investigations.

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Effects of Various Cognitive Processes on Quasi-Periodic Patterns

2019-05 , Abdulhameed, Sarah Qussai

Quasi Periodic Patterns are a way of finding reoccurring patterns in brain imaging data. In this experiment, researchers were interested in examining how similar QPPs were in various cognitive processes. In order to execute this, researchers put participants in an fMRI scanner and obtain functional brain images as they conducted a 0-back task, a 2-back task, flanker task, and a resting state scan. It was hypothesized that 0-back and 2-back brain activity would be most similar, then flanker brain activity will be similar to these, and the resting state scan would not be similar to any of the tasks. In addition, it was hypothesized that the 2-back QPP will have greater correlation strength and frequency than the 0-back QPP. A cluster analysis was executed to obtain an average template for each of the conditions which was compared between each other to obtain an index of similarity. Future work should include different tasks that are dependent on other cognitive processes to see the effects on their QPPs.

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The Mechanisms of the Temporal Release from Proactive Interference

2014-04-29 , Lindsey, Dakota Roy Bailey

The release from proactive interference (PI) is a well-studied phenomenon, but its cause is elusive. When a release in PI is caused by changes in the content of to-be-remembered items, the more accurate retrieval is likely a result of changes in context (Watkins & Watkins, 1975). However, changes in context do not readily explain the cause of PI release resulting from a temporal delay. Instead, it could be that during the delay subjects disengage from intrusive information from previous trials. The ability to disengage from no-longer-relevant information is related to fluid intelligence (Gf). I predicted that this ability to disengage, as defined by fluid intelligence, is the driving factor of the time-based release from PI. In order to test this prediction, I administered a free recall task to individuals of high and low Gf. The time between the last two lists was lengthened to cause release. The time manipulation did not cause a release from PI; essentially, this result represents a failure to replicate. Limitations of the study and potential methodological issues are discussed.

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Culture influences source-memory for self-referenced information

2012-05-07 , Blenis, Robert Colin

Much of existing memory research has focused on individuals from Western cultures. As our society becomes increasingly multi-cultural, a cross-cultural approach to memory research is critical for generating more generalizable theories of memory. The values an individual endorses can influence the information that they remember, and the values that different cultural groups cultivate lead to substantive differences in the way people understand themselves. For example, East Asian cultures cultivate values of interdependence, while Western cultures cultivate values of independence. In this study, students from East Asian and Western cultures decided whether trait adjectives were self-descriptive. The adjectives were presented in two contexts: a context stressing independence and a context stressing interdependence. It was predicted that source memory would be improved in contexts that emphasize values that are consistent with the cultural values an individual endorses. Americans accurately recalled more words paired with the context stressing independence than words paired with the context stressing interdependence; suggesting that source memory improves when details being recollected are consistent with cultural values. No significant effects were found within the Chinese group.

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