Tag: Taylor Guthrie

Emotion and Identity Influence on Associative Memory 

Presenter(s): Melissa Adler – Human Physiology

Faculty Mentor(s): Dasa Zeithamova, Taylor Guthrie

Poster 101

Research Area: Psychology

Eye witness testimonies play an important role in the criminal justice system. These testimonies depend upon the witness’ abilities to remember not only individual elements of events (e.g., having seen a specific person before), but remember how the elements of the event are associated with one another (e.g., having seen the person and the gun together). The events involved are usually emotionally charged but past studies on the influence of emotion on memory have focused primarily
on how people remember individual elements rather than associations between multiple elements. People’s perceptions
may also be influenced by their biases and stereotypes towards certain races and/or genders. In this experiment, I explored how effects of face identity and emotion influence people’s memories. I hypothesized that non-Caucasian, emotional, male faces will inhibit associative memory. Participants studied associations between two individual objects or between a face
and an object and were then tested on how well they recalled those associations, as well as if they tended to connect related memories. The face stimuli were of different races and genders and had either neutral or angry expressions. Preliminary results indicate that the emotional faces, specifically the non-Caucasian, male faces, have an impact on the participant’s abilities to form associations and recall those associations later. Results from this experiment may demonstrate challenges involving eye-witness testimonies. If it is shown that emotion coupled with certain identity factors interrupts these associative memory processes, then the validity of eye-witness testimonies falls in to question.

Valence modulates self/other neural recapitulation during interpersonal perception.

Presenter(s): Faith Collins—Pychology

Faculty Mentor(s): Robert Chavez, Taylor Guthrie

Session 5.5: McNair Scholars Presentations

Previous research has demonstrated that neural responses during self-referential thought are recapitulated in the brains of close friends thinking about the self . However, we also know that these processes are influenced by the affective valence of the stimuli and these processes recruit similar areas of the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) . Does positive or negative valence drive the coherence between these representations? We sought to test this question by recruiting small groups of close- knit individuals in a round-robin fMRI design . Subjects reflected on positive and negative traits about both themselves and their group members to estimate neural responses to self and every other person in the group . Next, we used a multi-level linear mixed effects model to compare the correlation distance between self-congruent and self-incongruent patterns striated by positive and negative affect . We found that valence, especially negative valence, modulates the strength of self/other recapitulation effects in the MPFC . These results suggest that affective information influences the neural bases of interpersonal perception and contributes to our understanding of the mechanisms by which valence influences how our sense of self is represented in the minds of others .

Convergence of dyadic similarity ratings predicts similarity in neural representations of others within social networks

Presenter(s): Youri Benadjaoud—Human Physiology/Psychology

Faculty Mentor(s): Taylor Guthrie, Rob Chavez

Session: Prerecorded Poster Presentation

A history of classic research in social psychology has demonstrated that human social groups are highly homophilous- people tend to associate with others similar to themselves . More recently, researchers showed that the brain shows similar effects of homophily, with close individuals showing greater neural response similarity to naturalistic stimuli than unfamiliar individuals (Parkinson et al ., 2018) . It is an open question, however, whether a similar degree of neural homophily exists when close individuals think of other specific members of their social group . The current study investigated this question by recruiting multiple social network groups that consisted of several close-knit individuals . Using a round robin fMRI design, individuals completed a standard self/other trait judgement task in which each participant was both the perceiver and a target . Similarity among dyadic pairs were calculated within multivoxel response patterns to each other member of their group . Using the correlation distance between multivoxel pattern response vectors combined with euclidean distance calculations between perceiver ratings of similarity with the target, we fit a multilevel linear effects model that predicted neural similarity from the convergence of dyadic similarity ratings. Our results indicate that the degree of similarity between multivoxel response patterns while individuals were rating the same target were significantly predicted by the the degree to which the perceivers agreed on how similar they were with the target . These findings suggest that people who agree on how similar a person is to themselves tend to have greater similarity in neural representations of that particular other .