1,019 research outputs found
OTOH
No full textContains the essay “Unsettled Feelings". Funded by SSHRC Institutional Explore Grant. Design by Chloe Brumwell & Randy Lee Cutler.Unsettle
Coat Cooke & Joe Poole | Coat Cooke & Rainer Wiens: Reviews
No full textCoat Cooke album reviews by Randy Raine-Reusch. Coat Cooke (sax); Joe Poole (drums); Rainer Wiens (guitar)
Interview with Randy Stoecker, author, Liberating Service Learning and the Rest of Higher Education Civic Engagement
No full textIt’s common for colleges in the U.S. to have service learning programs of one kind or another. These are sometimes criticized as being liberal or even radical endeavors — especially if “social justice” language is employed. But what if these are, in fact, conservative programs at their heart, ones that, in the context of the corporatized university, are furthering the neoliberal project and inhibiting the development of better social welfare policies? Listen to our interview with Randy Stoecker as he discusses his book, Liberating Service Learning and the Rest of Higher Education Civic Engagement (Temple University Press, 2016), for a first-hand critique as well as some thoughts on how we might all better serve our students — and the communities they would engage with
Cognitive neuroscience of episodic memory encoding
No full textThis paper presents a cognitive neuroscientific perspective on how human episodic memories are formed. Convergent evidence from multiple brain imaging studies using positron emission tomography (PET) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) suggests a role for frontal cortex in episodic memory encoding. Activity levels within frontal cortex can predict episodic memory encoding across a wide range of behavioral manipulations known to influence memory performance, such as those present during levels of processing and divided attention manipulations. Activity levels within specific frontal and medial temporal regions can even predict, on an item by item basis, whether an episodic memory is likely to form. Furthermore, separate frontal regions appear to participate in supplying code-specific information, including distinct regions which process semantic attributes of verbal information as well as right-lateralized regions which process nonverbal information. We hypothesize that activity within these multiple frontal regions provides a functional influence (input) to medical temporal regions that bind the information together into a lasting episodic memory trace. The question addressed in this paper is simple: why do certain events and experiences form episodic memories? This question can be answered at different levels of description. At one level, theories from cognitive psychology provide an account of how certain forms of processing facilitate episodic memory formation, outlining the conditions necessary to promote these forms of processing and the many variables that may influence retrieval of episodic memories after they have formed. At another level, evidence from neuroscience provides information about the neural structures that support encoding, and characterizes the operations carried out by these neural structures. The view of encoding presented here reflects a cognitive neuroscience approach that relates these two levels of description. The aim is to understand how encoding and its behavioral manifestations arise from the workings of underlying neural structures. What follows is a review of recent results from brain imaging studies that suggests a cognitive neuroscience theory of how episodic memories form and why some experiences are more likely than others to establish a lasting memory trace. While the theory is incomplete, there is good evidence supporting the notion that certain types of encoding processes may onto neural activity within specific brain regions, and that evidence from neuroscience can inform and constrain studies of behavior and vice versa. Although several brain regions are likely to be involved in episodic memory formation, in this paper particular focus is placed on (1) the role of the frontal cortex in episodic memory encoding, and (2) how frontal regions may interact with medical temporal regions that play a well-established role in episodic (and semantic) memory formation. The main conclusion drawn is that for an episodic memory to form an event must encourage elaboration of information within specific frontal regions that provide a critical input to medical temporal cortex. Components of these ideas have been presented previously (e.g., for a highly overlapping explication see [Buckner et al., 1999] and [Buckner, 1999])
Reflections 1979
No full textThe 1979 issue of Reflections is edited by Randy Waters with Michele Barale and Joyce Compton Brown serving as faculty advisers. Cover art and photography is by Les Brown. Author biographies are included on a contributors page at the conclusion of the issue. Award winners of the student literary context include: Randy Waters, Debbie Drayer, and Susan Sheilds.https://digitalcommons.gardner-webb.edu/reflections/1005/thumbnail.jp
Trying versus succeeding: Event-related designs dissociate memory processes
No full textFirst paragraph: We have all experienced the frustration of trying to remember a name or fact that feels as if it is at the tip of our tongue but remains inaccessible despite our best efforts to retrieve it. This common occurrence provides a heuristic demonstration that acts of remembering can be separated into two types of processes—one associated with the effort of retrieving and one associated with success in retrieving. In the instance of the "tip-of-the-tongue" phenomenon, effort is exerted but information is not successfully retrieved. While this exact experience is not the focus of the study by Ranganath and Paller in this issue of Neuron (1999), the phenomenon illustrates the issue that is explored; namely, understanding how and where the processes associated with retrieval effort and retrieval success occur in the brain. Ranganath and Paller have shed new light on the question of what brain regions are involved in effort and success during episodic memory (e.g., see Tulving 1983) by mapping event-related potentials (ERPs)
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Neural Circuits at the Intersection of Feeling and Deciding
No full textAffect plays a central role in perception and action. We register how good or bad we feel about objects in our environment at the moment of perception. These associations can guide decisions between different courses of action. And how we feel about those decisions influences subsequent affective states, and therefore subsequent decisions. A consistent set of brain regions has been implicated in affect and decision-making – including regions of medial prefrontal cortex, striatum, and insula – but their respective roles in interfacing between affect, valuation and choice are debated. One region in particular, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex/medial orbitofrontal cortex (vmPFC/mOFC), finds itself at the center of both affective and seemingly non-affective phenomena, in ways that can be either central or peripheral to the decision at hand. The current studies use functional MRI to explore the role of these different circuits during the process of generating automatic affective associations (Parts 1 and 3), integrating those affective associations into value-based decisions (Parts 2 and 3), and then integrating the experience of choosing into its own affective association (Part 3). Part 1 shows that the same region of vmPFC/mOFC automatically tracks the associations an object has with an affective valence (i.e., how unpleasant/pleasant it is) as well as with other objects in memory. Part 2 shows that affective associations for abstract but morally salient outcomes (hypothetical lives saved vs. sacrificed) can be integrated into a common value to guide moral judgments. The neural circuits involved in this process were consistent with those that have played similar roles when decisions were instead between food or monetary rewards. Part 3 shows that decisions between multiple rewarding options (i.e., "win-win" choices) activate separate neural circuits involved in evaluating (a) expected rewards and (b) the difficulty of making a choice, with the consequence being a simultaneously (a) positive and (b) anxiety-provoking affective experience. The vmPFC/mOFC played an important role in each of the three studies, in a manner consistent with a proposed role in integrating affective experience with other representations in memory in order to inform feelings and behavior. Together, these findings help to better elucidate the roles of different neural circuits in translating affective experience into choice and choices into affective experiences.Psycholog
Species suitability guide for Colorado
No full textCompiled by Randy Moench, data from the Colorado State Forest Nursery, Fort Collins, Colorado
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Precision Examination of Real-World Stress and Behavior Using Deep Digital Phenotyping
No full textLife stress has been consistently linked to poor mental health outcomes, but we know comparatively less about the more proximate impacts of life stress on daily affect and behavior. The current dissertation leverages recent advances in digital technology and analytical approaches to examine real-world life stress and its affective and behavioral correlates in a cohort of first-year college students naturally exposed to multifaceted stressors as they transitioned to college life. For a full academic year, participants provided continuous accelerometer data from an actigraphy wristband for the objective estimation of sleep duration and waketime activity. Additionally, participants used their phones to complete daily self-reports of perceived stress sources, affect, behavior, as well as the main events of their day, and completed periodic web-based assessments of global psychopathology symptoms. Similar data was collected in a timely 3-month follow-up study as the same participants underwent a new, unprecedented life transition: the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Following a general review of relevant background literature in Chapter 1, novel insights into real-world life stress drawn from these datasets are offered across three papers presented in Chapters 2 through 4.
Chapter 2 (Paper 1) examines fluctuations in stress, affect, and behavior over the course of the first year of college. Negative emotions, sleep patterns, and academic and social activity varied substantially over the course of the year as well as between individuals. Critically, while academics were a common source of stress for all students, a vulnerable subgroup reporting greater frequency of perceived social stress went on to report the highest global clinical symptoms at the end of the year, suggesting dissociable effects of different stress sources on mental health. Two years later, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the first-year subgroup with highest distress again stood out by frequent social stress and elevated clinical symptoms, suggesting that focus on sustained interpersonal stress, relative to academic stress, may be especially helpful to identify students at heightened risk for psychopathology.
Chapter 3 (Paper 2) introduces a novel individual-level linear model (iLM) to estimate day-to-day associations between perceived stress levels and actigraphy-derived sleep duration within individuals and unbiased by the group. While stress and sleep duration were inversely related in most participants, the iLM revealed that the temporal direction of these associations is person-specific, identifying a variety of individual phenotypes that may account for the diverse group-level findings reported in prior literature: for some, elevated stress in the day was associated with shorter sleep later that night; for others, shorter sleep was associated with elevated stress the next day; others showed both directions of associations, and some showed no association. Paired with intensive longitudinal data, our individual-level model provides a precision framework for the estimation of stable real-world behavioral and psychological dynamics, and may support the personalized prioritization of intervention targets for health and wellbeing.
Chapter 4 (Paper 3) investigates the proximate correlates of academic and social stressful events on daily affect and behavior within individuals. Experiences of stress were characterized from participants’ daily voice diaries narrating the main events of the day, using a combination of human labeling and large language models fine-tuned for sentiment analysis and topic modeling. Multilevel models assessing within-person associations found that days with academic stressful events were characterized by shorter sleep duration and decreased physical activity, as well as by reduced social interaction and increased time spent on schoolwork. Meanwhile, days with social stressful events were not systematically associated to changes in behavior, but they stood out by heightened negative affect, above and beyond the effect of academic events. Our results suggest that academic and social dimensions of life stress may have distinct signatures on daily affect and behavior, which in turn may go on to shape individuals’ long-term wellbeing.
Chapter 5 discusses the main contributions and limitations of this body of work. In all, the current dissertation provides valuable insights into the effects of life stress on real-world emotions, behavior, and overall wellbeing at multiple timescales. Our approach offers a foundation for the characterization of life dynamics at both the individual and the group levels, with potential implications for the development of precision health and wellbeing interventions
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