Do Song Sparrows Alter Song in Noisy Natural Environments?

College of Natural Resources & Sciences

This project studied the minimum song note frequencies of Song Sparrows in two different environments. Our results suggest that vocal plasticity arose as an adaptation in response to loud ocean surf, rivers, and wind.

DOC Sampling from Little River and Mad River

College of Natural Resources & Sciences

Dissolved Organic Carbon (DOC) is a fraction of organic carbon with size less than 0.2 micrometers. DOC comes from decomposed plants, bacteria, and algae. Abundant in marine and freshwater systems, it serves as the primary food source for aquatic webs. Generally, rivers have higher concentrations of DOC than the ocean does. In the estuary, a linear relationship between salinity and DOC indicates that the DOC concentration is fully due to mixing of freshwater and saltwater, and not any significant additional source or removal terms. DOC concentrations decreased from river to ocean. Scholarly articles have pointed this to be normal. Interpretation of data will continue.

Does cleft palate repair surgery restore normal neural processing for infant faces?

Rachael Kee, Psychology Graduate Student

College of Professional Studies

The current study used electroencephalography (EEG) to investigate adults’ processing of infant faces with cleft lip/palate before and after surgical repair. We found enhanced N170 responses for faces pre-repair surgery compared to post-repair surgery, suggesting that cleft lip/palate repair surgery may restore a more “normal” N170 response. Additionally, the P200 was smaller for the pre-repair surgery faces compared to post-repair surgery, which likely reflects the P200 responding to “typicality” for face stimuli as the post-repair surgery faces would appear more face-typical.

Does cleft palate repair surgery restore normal neural processing for infant faces?

Francesca Messina, Psychology Graduate Student

College of Professional Studies

Infant faces readily capture our attention and elicit enhanced neural processing, likely due to their importance in facilitating bonds with caregivers. Cues of poor health are associated with a lower degree of parental investment and facial malformations have been shown to negatively impact early infant-caregiver interactions, possibly due to altered perceptual processing of these faces compared to unaffected infant faces. The current study used eye tracking and electroencephalography (EEG) to investigate responses to infant faces before and after cleft palate repair surgery.

Does Handedness Affect Lateralization of Facial Emotion Processing

Shairy Jimenez Delgado, Psychology Graduate Student

College of Arts, Humanities & Social Sciences

Behavioral and neuroimaging work on the visual processing of facial stimuli has consistently demonstrated a right hemisphere bias in face perception generally as well as in emotion perception. Research on lateralization of other cognitive functions such as language has found differential patterns of lateralization between right-handed and left-handed individuals. Several neuroimaging studies found evidence between handedness and degree of lateralization for face processing. The current study seeks to extend previous work by investigating the relationship between degree of handedness and degree of hemispheric lateralization for the processing of faces displaying positive and negative affect.

Does Having Siblings Affect Caretaking Responses to Infants?

Joshua Worthington, Psychology Graduate Student

College of Professional Studies

Because siblings often fulfill a caregiver role in the home, this study investigated whether having siblings, and younger siblings in particular, impacts the reward value of and perceptual sensitivity to the ‘baby schema’. Participants completed a cuteness sensitivity rating task and an effort-based keypress task to measure the reward value of cuteness. They also reported whether they had siblings, and if so older vs younger siblings. Contrary to our hypotheses, having siblings did not influence the reward value of or perceptual sensitivity to ‘babyschema’.

Does Having Siblings Affect The Recognition of Children’s Emotional Displays?

Nathan Boone, Psychology Graduate Student

College of Professional Studies

The present study investigated the relationship between sibling caretaking experience and the ability to recognize emotions in children’s faces. Accuracy for recognizing emotional displays in children's faces was compared among individuals with younger siblings, older siblings, and no siblings. We did not find any evidence that having siblings impacts sensitivity to emotional displays in children's faces. We did, however, find evidence that some emotions are more easily assessed than others regardless of sibling status.

Does Juvenile Life History Affect the Marine Survival Rate of Coho Salmon?

College of Natural Resources & Sciences

I created a full life cycle model for Coho Salmon in Freshwater Creek in an effort to estimate separate overwinter and marine survival rates for two distinct juvenile life history strategies.

Does lexicality or phonemic predictability affect cross-modal identification of monosyllabic items?

College of Professional Studies

Speech is both auditory and visual. Both modalities can carry the same underlying (articulatory) information. This relationship serves cross-modal matching abilities in a variety of conditions, but to what extent is cross-modal matching ability mediated by abstract, cognitive processes, representations, and linguistic experience (e.g. lexicality or phonemic predictability)?

Does the Thatcher Effect Extend to Infant Faces?

Adnan Alyna, Psychology Undergraduate Student

College of Professional Studies

You will spend more time looking at faces than any other type of object in your lifetime. Because faces are such an important social signal, humans have developed a perceptual expertise for faces. Decades of research on the mechanisms of face processing have demonstrated we more heavily on configural processing strategies when viewing faces due to this expertise. However, this work has been done using almost exclusively adult facial stimuli. The current study uses a well-established configural disruption known as the Thatcher Effect to investigate the use of configural processing for infant faces. We find evidence that infant face processing may be less reliant on configural information.