Category: Oral Presentation

Effects of Feedback-Related Negativity on Excecutive Function and Development in Preschoolers

Presenter(s): Dakota Paulus—Biology, Biochemistry Minor

Co-Presenter(s): Nisha Sridhar, Katia Pramono

Faculty Mentor(s): Tyson Barker, Leticia Hayes

Session 5: The Wonders of the Brain

Executive function (EF) is a set of higher-order cognitive skills that support early learning and development . EF is highly influenced by environmental factors such as exposure to stress and social interaction . The prefrontal cortex (PFC) is one of the primary neural regions underlying EF . As the PFC develops during early childhood, the brain begins to lay the groundwork for more complex processing . One neural component that supports EF, feedback-related negativity (FRN), is measurable using electroencephalography (EEG), a device that measures the brain’s electrical activity . FRN is observed following both positive and negative feedback and is generated by the PFC . Although FRN is theorized to represent EF, little is known about the FRN development in early childhood: a period of critical EF development .

We predict that children’s FRN will be positively related to a behavioral measure of EF, which was collected during a previous study . Thus, we propose that FRN will reflect an early neural indicator
of EF . Previous research has used tasks without intermittent reinforcement making it difficult to maintain children’s attention . We will be using the Doors Game, which is a novel feedback-based task providing intermittent random reinforcement to children upon their selection between two doors . This task presents the reward immediately alongside feedback, thus it is more age-appropriate due to its ability to sustain their motivation . As feedback processing serves an important role in early childhood development and may serve as a novel indicator of EF, it is a promising area for research .

How Does Our Background Influence Social Output?

Presenter(s): Kathryn Paulus—Linguistics, Pre-International Studies

Co-Presenter(s): Claire Amistoso, Bryan Salazar, Owen Morgan

Faculty Mentor(s): Melissa Baese-Berk

Session 1: Human Behavior—I am Who I Am

Recently, intersectionality has been used to analyze social dynamics around the world . We recognize that everyone comes from different places and has many different experiences . To operationalize social background, we divided social background into four subsections: race/ ethnicity, socioeconomic, language and gender . Our research focuses on how people express each subsection of social background . We plan on releasing a survey that focuses on four major topics by asking a series of questions within each topic . Because of the current situation of the world, we plan on releasing this survey on our social media platforms such as Snapchat and Instagram . The significance of this research is to identify the results of intersectionality through social output from diverse backgrounds .

Focusing on those aspects of our lives is something that not everyone around the world fully realizes yet, as we only focus on either one or two of those . So it’s a topic that we as a research group want to focus as to how everything builds up to one point in our lives and how impactful it is for better or for worse .

The Atomistic Reconstruction of Coarse-Grained Polymeric Systems via Machine Learning Techniques

Presenter(s): Jake Olsen—Chemistry and Mathematics

Faculty Mentor(s): Marina Guenza, Jake Searcy

Session 1: It’s a Science Thing

Polymeric systems, things like proteins, DNA, and synthetic plastics, are of great interest for their applications in material design and the biomedical industry . Therefore, having time-efficient and inexpensive approaches to investigate these systems on multiple scales, from the microscopic to the macroscopic level, is of great importance and necessity . Molecular dynamics (MD) simulations are one such tool for investigating these systems; however, MD simulations that simulate polymer systems in their atomistic (AT) representation are unable to reach the time scale necessary so that the system exhibits the correct chain characteristics . Thus, coarse-graining (CG) methods, a process by which the local degrees of freedom are averaged out, are applied to improve upon computational time . Unfortunately, the computational gain is coupled with the loss of statistical information from the CG process . Therefore, to regain the lost AT information the CG trajectories need to be transformed back to an AT representation . This process is known as backmapping . Utilizing state- of-the-art machine learning techniques coupled with AT data, we have developed a backmapping procedure for CG polymeric systems . The model, centered around a recurrent neural network (RNN), shows strong agreement with the AT data across many statistical quantities prompting further investigation and development of the model .

A Critical Examination of Abstraction in John Dewey’s Reflective Thought

Presenter(s): William O’Brien—Philosophy

Faculty Mentor(s): Steven Brence

Session 3: Beyond a Melody

In this paper, I critically examine our human capacity for abstraction . I examine this tool in the pragmatic terms of John Dewey, wherein abstraction is understood as our human capacity used to successfully engage in our environment and achieve our interests and purposes . Specifically in the context of John Dewey’s reflective thought, I critically examine abstraction’s process and purpose . From this examination, the essential role that the tool of abstraction plays comes to light . It is seen that abstraction is necessary for reflective thought to function, and without it, this personally familiar process would cease to be . After showing abstraction’s essential role in this familiar context, I get into explaining problematic aspects of reflective thought’s logical understanding of abstraction . This understanding of abstraction has been the basis upon which reflective thought may produce logical results that are problematically ‘out of touch’ and biased . I take up the ‘reasonable woman standard’ in law to illustrate a concrete example of this . Ultimately, I conclude that for reflective thought we still need the same logical understanding of abstraction, but only insofar as it serves as a basis for a new logical understanding, wherein we must always ask and consider the question of who, in order to avoid logical results that are problematically exclusive and biased .

Glomerular Signals Underlying Olfactory Navigation

Presenter(s): Nelly Nouboussi—Biology

Faculty Mentor(s): Matt Smear, Amanda Welch

Session 3: The Substance of Us

The olfactory system is the least studied sense although it is very important for our existence . Our lab has examined the behavioral structure of olfactory navigation . Our next goal is to compare sampling movements directly against sensory input in order to establish a correlation between neural activity and behavior . The first step in this goal, which is the topic of my thesis, is to successfully express fluorescence indicators in the olfactory bulb and to detect this expression using our imaging apparatus . We are focusing specifically in the glomeruli, which contains the neurons responsible for converting odor information into action potentials . To achieve the expression of our fluorescence sensor GCaMP, we either injected a virus encoding the fluorescence protein into mice brains or engineered mice to encode the sensor gene in their genome . We worked with three mice strains:
B6 mice which can express GCaMP anywhere, Tbet-Cre mice which can express the virus only in the mitral layer and Tbet-Cre-Ai148D mice which contain the GCaMP gene in their genome . Histology revealed that we successfully expressed GCaMP in B6 mice, but we could only observe background fluorescence in Tbet-Cre and Tbet-Cre-Ai148D mice . This could result from the frying of the bulb due to continuous expression of the protein or the degradation of the virus . Despite the difficulty of the surgeries, we could visualize activity in the glomeruli of live mice with the two-photon microscope, although our success rate remains low . We are continuously adjusting our protocol to improve our techniques, so we can move on to the next stage of our project .

Supersymmetric Long Lived Particle Search Using Proton-Proton Collision Data and Simulations from the ATLAS Experiment

Presenter(s): Laura Nosler—Physics

Faculty Mentor(s): Laura Jeanty

Session 5: To the Moon and Back—Relativity Matters

Despite the wealth of information gained by high energy physics over the past few decades, there are still several fundamental gaps in our understanding of the universe . One theory that may provide answers to some of these questions is supersymmetry, which predicts the existence of new particles . In many variations of supersymmetry, some of these particles are expected to have comparatively longer lifetimes . Our research attempts to optimize searches for long lived particles by studying the properties of their signatures and comparing two different methods of reconstructing the energy missing after a collision, with the goal of understanding how the reconstruction algorithms behave for these new particles . To do this, we compare simulated data from proton-proton collisions detected by the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN reconstructed with these two different algorithms and perform analyses that reveal their differences . The results we have found so far have displayed the differences in the efficiencies of these reconstruction methods in our search, revealing the impact these algorithms will have on our final results and allowing us to improve our sensitivity by tuning our selection routines . The final goal of our experiment is to gain a more comprehensive understanding of how to accurately identify these particles in real data, at which point we will extend our experiment to include non-simulated collision data from the ATLAS experiment .

The Pearl of Santa Radegonda: An Investigation into Chiara Margarita Cozzolani’s Musical Fortune and Success during the Early to Mid-Baroque Era

Presenter(s): Natalie North—Percussion Performance and Music Theory

Faculty Mentor(s): Holly Roberts

Session 3: Beyond a Melody

In the second-half of the sixteenth century, the Council of Trent declared nuns as political entities whose musical activities required strict oversight . These papal mandates utterly failed in Milan, as they were met with the fiery opposition of Milanese nuns whose music would remain as heralding feats of their communities . In this project, I explore the music and life of Chiara Margarita Cozzolani (1602–78), a seventeenth-century nun and composer at the Milanese Benedictine convent, Santa Radegonda . In 1996, Robert Kendrick’s groundbreaking monograph (Celestial Sirens, Oxford University Press) immensely detailed the biographical and musical accounts of early modern women religious . For over twenty years, few scholars have continued this important work . Minimal scholarship has investigated how the backgrounds of Milanese nuns affected their long lasting legacies while living in cloistered convents . I contend that Cozzolani’s musical contribution would not have been celebrated during her lifetime had it not been for her entrance into the monastery as a member of Milanese nobility, during a time in which local clergy allowed women religious more artistic freedom . Additionally, I argue that Cozzolani’s position as maestra di cappella (choirmaster) of Santa Radegonda afforded her the unique privilege to perform, print, and preserve her music which ensured her legacy as a formidable composer in a field usually reserved for men . Support for my argument comes from the lack of extant biographies of Cozzolani’s female contemporaries that are without extraordinary upbringings . Had it not been for her fortunate happenstances, would Cozzolani’s music survive today?

Advancing threespine stickleback as an outbred immunogenetics model by pinpointing the onset of adaptive immunity

Presenter(s): Emily Niebergall—Biology

Faculty Mentor(s): William Cresko, Emily Beck

Session 4: Earning your Stripes

Understanding when the onset of the adaptive immune system occurs is important for understanding host-microbe interactions and etiology of disease . While the onset of adaptive immunity has been studied in inbred animal models, i .e . mice and zebrafish, these laboratory models lack the genetic diversity found in humans and may not be appropriate for all studies . We are advancing threespine stickleback fish (Gasterosteus aculeatus) as a novel outbred immunogenetics model to elucidate the complexities of these interactions in the context of genetic variation . It is currently unknown when adaptive immunity is onset in threespine stickleback . To pinpoint the timing of onset of adaptive immunity, we looked at the expression of an early adaptive immune gene known to be involved in T-lymphocyte development throughout a developmental time series . T-lymphocytes are a primary adaptive immune cells able to recognize and elicit a response against pathogens . Early development of these cells utilizes two interconnected protein complexes: CD3 and TCR . The pre-TCR/CD3 supercomplex has been used to study the ontogeny of the immune system and has provided insight into the development of the adaptive immune system . In this study, we chose to focus on cd3d, a gene involved in the CD3 complex . Similar work determining the onset of adaptive immunity in other fish has produced a wide range of results, from 72 hours post fertilization to 20 days post hatching (dph) . We found that by 10 dph, cd3d was expressed in all individuals, with population level variation indicating some may exhibit expression earlier in development .

Outlasting the Binary: Analysis of Gender and Queer Representation in Outlast II

Presenter(s): Maggie Murphy—Psychology

Faculty Mentor(s): Oluwakemi “Kemi” Balogun

Session 1: Human Behavior—I am Who I Am

The components within Horror Media has been a topic of study for decades . A major gap in the scholarship is how representations within horror media impacts marginalized communities negatively . Using the first-person survival horror game Outlast II, I ask how these tropes
accentuate the archetypes of hegemonic masculinity and emphasized femininity as well as how they conventionalize individuals that challenge the gender binary . The cutscenes, dialogue, documents, and recordings collected will be analyzed, providing evidence for the forthcoming discussions about the representation of gender and queer communities within this game . Results show that the game emphasizes similar themes commonly found in horror media . These include: the “male protector” and “damsel in distress” archetypes, the violent mistreatment of women, framing sexually transmitted diseases (STD’s) as grotesque, exclusion of primary female characters, stereotyping queer characters, and emphasis on hegemonic masculinity, a term coined by Connell (1987) . This case study will provide further evidence for ongoing research on horror media and its use of the gender binary, stereotypical male/female roles, and exclusion of non-stereotypical gender non-conforming or queer characters .

Guidelines for the Representation of Women in Written News

Presenter(s): Julia Mueller—Journalism

Faculty Mentor(s): Peter Laufer

Session 3: Pens & Clicks are Mightier than the Sword

Researchers have recently begun to realize the impact of patriarchy on language, and the consequential role of male-centric or male-normative language in separating men from women, thus reinforcing women’s roles as the “second sex” in society . Even as society takes strides towards impartiality, implicit bias is still present in the way we speak, write—and specifically, report .

This thesis examines and analyzes current industry standards of style guidelines related to the representation of women in written news in the context of contemporary psychological and linguistic research on the interplay of language and gender . Developing case studies from the results of a survey disseminated to over a thousand journalism professionals in the Pacific Northwest, this project explores current industry practices, newsroom-specific practices, gender-focused trainings or lack thereof, and the survey subjects’ own perceptions of where journalistic standards are lacking with regard to the representation of women in the news .