Category: 2015

Characterization of Inputs to Active Basolateral Amygdala Neurons after Different Behavioral Treatments

Presenter: Harrison Fontaine

Mentors: Leah Deblande and Clifford Kentros, Institute of Neuroscience

Poster: 22

Major: Biology and Human Physiology

The amygdala is a brain structure that is required for the acquisition and storage of fearful memories. In humans, abnormal amygdalar activity has been associated with post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, and depression.
One component of simple fear memory formation is the association of a fearful stimulus and an otherwise neutral predictive stimulus. This association occurs in the basolateral amygdala (BLA). While the main inputs to the BLA
are well characterized, the specific coding strategies these inputs use to convey information has not been detailed. We used transgenic mice in conjunction with a modified viral tracer to determine how the inputs to recently active BLA neurons varied after exposure to fear-inducing and non-fear-inducing situations, with the reasoning that if different inputs were labeled after different treatments, inputs must be employing a neuron-specific coding strategy. In addition, we examined the differential activity of neurons in the BLA that may be gating the formation of fear memories. We reasoned that if these neurons were differentially active between fear-inducing and non-fear-inducing situations, these neurons might indeed be gating fear memory formation. Our results supported the use of a neuron- specific coding strategy in BLA input regions, as well as the model of a subset of BLA neurons gating fear memory formation. These results elucidate aspects of fear memory circuitry, and thus have implications in treating fear circuit pathologies.

Chronic Passive Heat Therapy Improves Microvascular Nitric Oxide-Dependent Dilation during Skin Local Heating

Presenter: Taylor Eymann

Mentors: Christopher Minson and Vienna Brunt, Human Physiology

Poster: 21

Major: Human Physiology

Vascular dysfunction, often caused by deficient nitric oxide (NO) production, is present in the majority of cardiovascular disease and is first detectible in the microcirculation. Heat stress can increase NO production via
heat shock protein expression. Therefore chronic passive heat therapy (CHT) may improve microvascular health
and lower cardiovascular risk. The cutaneous circulation is easily accessible and represents overall microvascular health. PURPOSE: To observe the effects of 8wks of CHT on cutaneous NO-dependent dilation. METHODS: Seven healthy, sedentary subjects were immersed in either 40.5°C (N=5; CHT) or 36.5°C (N=2; sham group) water for 90min 4-5 times per week for 8 weeks. Before and after the 8wks, two intradermal microdialysis fibers were inserted into the forearm and infused with lactated Ringer’s solution (control) and a nitric oxide synthase competitive inhibitor (L-NNA), to inhibit NO synthase. Increased skin blood flow responding to local skin heating to 39°C, which is a test of microvascular health, was measured at each site using laser-Doppler flowmetry. NO-dependent dilation, calculated as the difference between control and L-NNA sites, was expressed as percent maximal cutaneous vascular conductance (%CVCmax; flow/mean arterial pressure). RESULTS: CHT increased NO-dependent dilation from 27±4 to 36±5%CVCmax (p<0.05). No improvement was observed in sham subjects. CONCLUSION: Our findings suggest heat therapy increases NO production and vasodilation in the human microcirculation. Continued exposure to passive heat may lower cardiovascular risk.

Argument Marking Morphology and Verb Stem Selection in Takelma

Presenter: Stephanie Evers

Mentors: Scott DeLancey, Linguistics; Joana Janen, Northwest Indian Language Institute

Oral Presentation

Major: Linguistics

Takelma, a silent (not currently spoken but undergoing revitalization) indigenous language of southwest Oregon, employs a verb system that features a close relationship between a verb’s stem and its argument markers. This system includes the choice between two stems for each verb, traditionally referred to as ‘aorist’ and ‘general,’ but described in this paper as ‘realis’ and ‘irrealis.’ The ‘realis’ stem indicates events that occurred in the past, are occurring presently, or are about to immediately occur (see Example 1), while the irrealis indicates events that could happen, that will happen in the future, or that are only known at secondhand—as well as imperative constructions (see Example 2).

Ex. 1

tʼomo-x-imi-th kill.1-SAP-1PLOBJ-2PLSUBJ.II ‘You killed us.’

Ex. 2

honòʼ tóowm-x-pi-n

again kill.2-SAP-2SG.OBJ-1SG ‘again I will kill yours’

The verb system also includes subject markers that indicate transitivity as well as tense and mood, and versatile object markers that can interact with a subject to indicate shifts in valence (changes to number of arguments, such as subject and objects, directly controlled by the verb) or unusual placement of an object noun within a clause.

This presentation explores Takelma verb construction, describing basic morphological ordering of a verb’s stem, argument markers, and valence-shifting affixes (prefixes and suffixes), as well as analyzing stem choices and the use and interaction of subject and object markers on the verb. It is intended to clarify and update portions of the work done by Edward Sapir (1912) by describing the use and formation of Sapir’s tense-moods using modern terminology, reanalyzing morphological markers such as the Speech Act Participant Marker (which are not addressed in the original grammar), and providing a morphological position class diagram. This research contributes to the framework for future syntactic and morphological research in Takelma, particularly to the formation of realis and irrealis verb stems, and also adds to the knowledge necessary for creating pedagogical materials, which will be an invaluable tool in the process of revitalization. All examples provided in this paper are taken from Edward Sapir’s 1912 grammar “The Takelma Language of Southwest Oregon,” his 1909 “Takelma Texts” and his 1907 “Medicine Formulas.” Glosses are this author’s original work.

The White Male Protagonist: Friend or Foe?

Presenter: Samantha Elwood

Mentor: Kirby Brown, English and Native Studies

Oral Presentation

Majors: English and Spanish

Even though The Last of the Mohicans and Avatar occur hundreds of years apart, both try to heal culpability felt by white settler-colonial audiences surrounding the United States’ foundational history of colonialism. The Last of the Mohicans directed by Michael Mann and based off of the novel by James Fenimore Cooper, follows Nathaniel Poe, a frontier man, and his adoptive Native American family, Chingachgook and Uncas, as they walk the line between indifference and concern during the events of the French and Indian war in the mid-18th century. James Cameron’s film Avatar explores the newly discovered world of Pandora and its indigenous people, the Na’vi, through the eyes of Jake Sully, the narrator of the film and the narrative anchor for both species. Both films explore the usually contentious relations between white and Native American society in a more positive and mutual way. The Last of the Mohicans and Avatar attempt to console the colonial anxieties through their depictions of Native Americans as sympathetic, but by mediating these characters through white male protagonists, they naturalize the history of white dominance of Native Americans because whiteness becomes vital to the futurity of the Native American culture.

The Love of a Man, The Love of a Community: Desire as Decolonial Critique in Alexie’s The Business of Fancydancing

Presenter: Joel Ekdahl

Mentor: Kirby Brown, English and Native Studies

Oral Presentation

Major: English

Queer Indigenous critics Lisa Tatonetti and Gabriel Estrada criticize Sherman Alexie’s The Business of Fancydancing for upholding the rural-urban binary, and for defining the Spokane reservation as “a landscape emptied of gay people” (Tatonetti 173). They argue that this binary panders to a white-washed form of multicultural theory whose focus on the fragmented, alienated, urban subject erases the particular circumstances of indigenous decolonization. This divide, they argue, forecloses the recovery “of dynamic Two-Spirit traditions and communities” and thus fails to establish a critique that is both queer and indigenous (Estrada). However, by reading Alexie’s Spokane Reservation as an absolute cultural domain, Tatonetti and Estrada’s criticism occludes Alexie’s engagement with the continuing process of colonization. Alexie utilizes the unique relationship between Seymour Polatkin, Aristole Joseph, and Mouse to explore the diverse issues of reservation poverty, alcoholism, white voyeurism, and internalized Native heteronormativity. Alexie, instead of focusing on Two-spirit revitalization, resists the temptation to essentialize indigenous queer theory by locating critique at the level of personal desire. Focalizing my analysis around Seymour Polatkin, I will argue that his poetry bridges his personal desire to obtain positive recognition while also critiquing colonialism through the stories of his reservation.

Determining Ancestral Affiliation of Unprovenienced Human Remains from the Island of Mustique, Grenadine Islands, Caribbean

Presenter: Taylor Dodrill

Mentors: Scott Fitzpatrick and Greg Nelson, Anthropology

Poster: 19

Majors: Biology and Anthropology

The dearth of laws protecting cultural heritage in many Caribbean small island nations, or the lack of resources to enforce such laws, has led to destruction of numerous sites due to the removal of remains that would otherwise provide important archaeological information to help establish cultural context and affinity. We present an analysis of unprovenienced human remains that were in storage on the private island of Mustique in the Grenadines, southern Caribbean, but that were reportedly taken by a local resident from the smaller nearby island of Petite Mustique for personal use and display. With permission from the Mustique Company, archaeologists brought the remains to the University of Oregon’s Island & Coastal Archaeology Laboratory for analysis. The goal was to determine the number of individuals present, their probable age, sex, pathologies, and possible ancestry, in order to assist in repatriation. Preliminary results suggest that the collection consists of 341 bones or bone fragments, representing four adult individuals. Initial age and sex estimates for the three more complete individuals indicate that two are middle-aged males and one an older female. Robust muscle insertions of one adult male may indicate strenuous activity
in life. Intermingling of cattle bone with the remains, dental wear patterns, and other skeletal indicators suggest that these individuals probably date to the historic period. Further analysis that is now underway, including 3D geometric morphometrics of the skulls, will attempt to identify ancestry in more detail so the remains can be properly repatriated.

Role of Endothelin Pathway in Enteric Nervous System Development and Hirschsprung Disease

Presenter: Parham Diba

Mentors: Julia Ganz and Judith Eisen, Biology

Poster: 18

Major: Human Physiology 

The enteric nervous system (ENS) is the largest part of the peripheral nervous system, containing about 400–600 million neurons in humans. It comprises a complex network of neurons and glia and controls intestinal functions, such as motility. Hirschsprung disease (HSCR) is a multifactorial congenital disease in which distal intestine is uninnervated and immotile. A variety of signaling pathways, including the endothelin signaling pathway, regulate ENS development during embryonic stages. In mouse, Endothelin3 and endothelin receptor type B regulate ENS development and mutations in these genes are found in some HSCR patients. However, there are still open questions about how the endothelin pathway is involved in ENS development, such as how it affects progenitor migration and neuronal subtype differentiation. To test the role of the endothelin pathway in ENS development, we are generating zebrafish mutants in components of the endothelin pathway using CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing technology. We are currently creating zebrafish mutants in several different endothelin ligands and endothelin converting enzyme 1 and we have generated a mutant in the endothelin receptor gene ednrb1b. We will then analyze the phenotypes of these mutants to learn how ENS progenitor migration and differentiation are affected. Our strategy will enable us to explore the role of endothelin signaling pathway genes in ENS development and to determine if mutations in these genes lead to an HSCR-like phenotype.

Achieving Scalable Performance on the Intel Xeon Phi for Data-Intensive Workloads

Presenter: Kirsten Dawes

Co-Presenter: Elliott Ewing

Mentor: Hank Childs, Computer Science

Oral Presentation

Majors: Mathematics and Computer Science

As new computer architectures are developed, various concerns are created. Understanding scalability of performance is an important concern for many legacy programs on Intel’s Xeon Phi, a many integrated core architecture. These legacy programs use a significant amount of computational resources, which poses the issues of time, power, and memory consumption as the problem sizes increase. We will be looking at the scalability for the execution time of a program as the number of processors increase. Given this constraint, we should expect to see a decrease in the time of execution of a program using more processors. Exploring data-intensive workloads will allow us to be able to track how certain legacy programs mitigate the issue of scalability on this new architecture. We explored this new architecture by creating two competing mini applications, where each mini application replicated a variation on a legacy program called “VisIt”, which works on data intensive workloads. The two mini applications explored thread affinity and work affinity by implementing image processing filters with a data flow pipeline. We conducted experiments creating different size output and input images; number of image processing filters; type of image processing filters; and number of threads running. The experiments produced timing data based on CPU time as well as time per thread. With the quantitative data, we produced, we were able to conclude that data-intensive workloads like “VisIt” should produce excellent scalability on this new architecture.

Procedural Justice of Court Appointed Experts: Procedural Justice and Power Differentials

Presenter: Benjamin Davies

Mentors: Robert Mauro and Robert Rocklin, Psychology

Poster: 17

Major: Psychology 

Studying procedural justice has ramifications for legitimacy, and ultimately, legal system success. Jurists are concerned that any departure from the adversary system would call the legitimacy of the system into question. The use of court appointed experts is one such departure. We aim to examine the perceptions of procedural justice in court-appointed experts and the moderating effect of power on this relationship. Participants will be presented with 4 vignette scenarios describing a civil negligence trial in which the plaintiff always loses. The subjective power (Individual, Corporation or Government Agency) of the plaintiff, and whether the 3rd testifying expert is court appointed/adversarial will be varied and participants will report their perceptions of procedural justice in addition to individual difference measures. We have two predictions; (1) Across conditions, court-appointed experts will be perceived as less procedurally just than adversarial experts and (2) There will be an interaction between court- appointed expert and plaintiff status, such that if there is a high status plaintiff and a court appointed expert, perceptions of procedural justice will be lowest. While results have not been collected, we believe these findings will add a new dimension to current understanding of the justice of legal processes, and pave the way towards a more in depth study of court-appointed experts.

Moral Decision Makers: Being Watched and our Judgments of Others

Presenter: Benjamin Davies

Mentors: Azim Shariff and Bret Mercier, Psychology

Poster: 16

Major: Psychology 

Past research has found that some individuals make moral decisions based on rules (deontologists) while others make moral decisions based a deliberative cost benefit analysis of outcomes (utilitarian). Deontologists tend to perceive moral decisions, which break a societal rule (i.e. killing a person), as immoral even when that prevents the most harm. In this study, we tested whether people will make more deontological moral decisions when they know their responses will be visible to others (compared to when responses are anonymous). Undergraduate participants (n=75) completed a worksheet assessing their perceptions of different utilitarian moral decisions. We informed participants that their answers would either be read by another participant (visible condition) or anonymous (anonymous condition). Contrary to our predictions, participants in the visible condition did not make different moral decisions than those in the anonymous condition. In the second part of the study, participants were given the same moral decision questions, ostensibly completed by another participant, and asked to judge the other participant’s personality. Participants perceived those who made deontological decisions as more moral, trustworthy, warm, and caring, but also as less efficient.