Cognitive Bias in Adolescent Rats After Exposure to Social Stress
Student name: Nicole Joh
Project advisor: Travis Hodges
Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) is a common mood disorder more prevalent in women than men. A key symptom of MDD is negative cognitive bias, the increased perception of ambiguous or neutral contexts as being negative. Negative cognitive bias can predict future MDD symptoms, and to a greater extent in adolescent girls at-risk for depression than in adolescent boys. Previous research has found that in fear-based cognitive tasks, rats demonstrate age and sex differences in cognitive bias1 . However, these studies strictly focus on how to reduce negative cognitive bias rather than how to improve positive cognitive bias. In this project, we use a reward-based cognitive task to study the positive cognitive bias of adolescent male and female rats after stress or no-stress.
Adolescent Long Evans Rats underwent 16-day social isolation stress or no-stress prior to cognitive bias testing. To test reward-based cognitive bias, rats underwent five phases: familiarization, habituation, pre-training, training, and probe trials. In the familiarization phase, rats received two bowls with a reward for up to 10 minutes to learn to associate bowls with rewards. In the habituation phase, rats were introduced to the cognitive bias apparatus. Our apparatus is a 54 cm x 36 cm x 53 cm box with changeable textured flooring that leads into two smaller chambers. Each chamber is associated with a different scent and reward. Coarse flooring is paired with cinnamon and the high reward, which is 3 cheerios, and smooth flooring is paired with coriander and the low reward, which is half a cheerio. In the pre-training phase, rats underwent 30 trials to associate the different textured floorings with its respective reward. During the training phase, rats repeated the previous procedures but were restricted to one choice, and they were tested until they learned the task. In the probe trials, rats underwent the same procedure as before but the textured flooring was an intermediate/ambiguous texture. The probe trials allow us to observe whether the animals choose a high reward (positive cognitive bias) or low reward (negative cognitive bias) based on their perception of the ambiguous stimulus. Previous research found reduced positive cognitive bias after stress exposure in juvenile rats2 . We expect that isolation stress will reduce positive cognitive bias to a greater extent in adolescent females compared to adolescent male rats.

Bilingualism and the N400: A Dynamic Model, National Science Foundation: Preparing Undergraduates for Research in STEM Using Electrophysiology (PURSUE)
Student names: Alejandra Lorenzo Abstract
Investigations into the dynamics of multiple language systems have gained traction in recent years. Research has established that foreign language mastery is achievable in adulthood and that multilingual reading activates parallel processing systems (Marian & Shook, 2012). However, mechanisms that support comprehension at the level of complex text in bilinguals remain largely unexplored. Previous studies (Perez et al., 2019) suggest that working memory, cognitive control, and proficiency aid multiple language processing. Yet, there is a gap in knowledge about how contextual resources (e.g. primes) aid in detection of comprehension errors via revision of existing ideas and representations about the text. This study used the N400 event-related potential component to provide insight into neural processing and cognition during reading comprehension. It explored semantic error detection as a marker of language comprehension and shed light on the role of context cues in bilingual reading processes.

Neurodiversity and Identity Development
Student Name: Ellen Parry Luff
Project Advisor: Alyssa Norris
Through this project I am looking to explore how Neurodiversity exists as a social identity and how it then relates to other aspects of identity such as class, race, gender, and sexuality. Some of the main questions asked are how does history affect our modern day understanding and relationship with Neurodiversity? How does the salience of other identities impact the salience of Neurodiverstiy in one's social identity? And what does it exactly mean to be Neurodivergent? In the presentation at hand I will be going over some different subtypes of Neurodiveristy such as Down Syndrome, Depression, Schizophrenia, Autism, and ADHD in order to examine the differences in relation to their role in identity as well as exploring how privilege affects how one relates to Neurodiversity. In the project as a whole I focus on the works of thinkers such as Tajfel for social identity development as well as a number of different authors such as Darling, Grinker, and Rosqvist et al., in order to examine both theories and history surrounding neurodivergence, mental health and disability as well as first person accounts. One idea I draw from is the idea of disability identity as outlined by Darling in the work Disability and Identity: Negotiating Self in a Changing Society. Here they define disability identity as the part of self-concept that comes from disability related self definitions of an individual1 . They go on to outline a number of different ways of relating to disability such as the affirmative type where one views disability as a fundamental and important part of their identity. Darling also discusses the role of salience in the formation of identity and how the way that one identifies with their disability is often influenced by how salient other parts of their identity (such as race and gender) are2 . In the work by Grinker titled Nobodies Normal: How Culture Created the Stigma of Mental Illness, they go over the history of our modern understanding of mental illness and how developments such as the rise of capitalism led to our modern understanding of mental illness3 . Additionally they looked at how over forms of oppression such as racism, sexism and classism shaped our understanding of mental illness4 . Drawing from the work of Rosqvist et al. in Neurodiversity Studies: A New Critical Paradigm I examine different models related to disability and neurodivergence such as the Medical Model, Social Model, and Value Neutral Hypothesis5

The Development of Visual Selective Attention and Working Memory
Student: Grace Wallsinger
Abstract
One current model of visual selective attention proposes two mechanisms that work together to achieve processing of important information: facilitation and suppression. Facilitation controls the processing of relevant target stimuli; whereas suppression works to filter out irrelevant distracting stimuli. While facilitation is seen in all ages, previous research indicates that suppression develops between ages 7-12 (Plebanek & Sloutsky 2017; 2019; Wong-Kee-You et al., 2019); however, the exact age at which suppression begins to develop and the mechanisms underlying its development are still largely unknown. One theory regarding the development of selective attention is that it is linked to the development of working memory given the functional and neural overlap between the two processes (Downing, 2000; LaBar et al., 2019). This study investigated the developmental timeline of suppression using electrophysiological methods to create a quantitative physiological measure of facilitation and suppression during visual selective attention using the P1/N1 event related potential (ERP) components. Further analysis examines the relationship between the development of suppression and visual working memory capacity during development. Understanding the development of suppression and working memory will provide useful information in creating effective classroom management strategies and enhancing focus of task-related information to foster learning in academic environments.

Psycholinguistic Investigation found in the Chinese version of The Cat in the Hat: How oral reading prosody affects reading comprehension
Yunyang Zhang
Advisor: Mara Breen
Abstract:
Prosody is a linguistic feature, referring to patterns in acoustic features of speech - duration, loudness, and pitch. Our current study focuses on how people’s prosody signals rhythm during the oral reading of poetry. We investigate the realization of the prosody of readers by analyzing their acoustic characteristics. With this overarching question, we use a rhyming, metrically-regular children’s book - Dr. Seuss’sThe Cat in the Hat (1957) as our study material. Our prior study finds that the hierarchical metric structure in The Cat in the Hat accounts for word duration (Breen, 2018). Specifically, people tend to have longer reading time on words that have a stronger meter, lower lexical frequency, high semantic content, and high syntactic strength. Inspired by the English study, we further wonder if these acoustic characteristics can be generalized across languages. Therefore, the independent study I was conducting last semester investigated the acoustic features in the Chinese version of The Cat in the Hat. My responsibility includes recruiting students, editing acoustic episodes and proceeding with alignment. While the final result hasn’t come out due to technical challenges, the study brings with us the value indications in explaining phonological differences between Chinese and English, and how such differences may account for variation in prosodic production. More importantly, we may further extend our current study to the field of social cognition, in which we can envision how linguistic features play roles in social interactions.