Recent ulab_cogscipsych_repext2021 items

All in a Day’s Laugh: A Replication and Extension of the Stress-Buffering Model of Positive Affect

Thu, 16 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Positive affect, which is known to evoke pleasurable enegagement with one's environment, has well-established potential to reduce the negative effects of stress (Fredrickson, 1998). Although there are various facets of postive affect, we principally examined the alleviating effect of laughter--a common operational defintion of positive affect--on mental and physiological stress responses (Herring et al., 2011). We did so by conducting a replication and extension of a study published by Zander-Schellenberg et al. (2020), who affiirmed the stress-buffering effect of laughter frequency in daily life. In our replication, we attempted to reproduce the findings of the original study, conducted a residual analysis of the statistical models used, and assessed laughter-stress interplay across individual participants. In our extension, we assessed the cumulative stress-buffering effect of laughter frequency in daily life by determining whether the original findings apply to...

Invariant Representations of Mass in the Human Brain and Its Effects on Inferences on Physical Collisions

Thu, 16 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

From the moment they are born, infants begin to build an internal model of their physical world. This understanding of physical laws, commonly referred to as intuitive physics, develops over time, enabling individuals to successfully explore and interact with their surroundings. However, the cognitive mechanisms through which humans acquire this understanding of physical quantities, such as mass, are unknown. This paper discusses current understanding of a distinct but foundational part of the intuitive physics engine, mass representation. Current research has localized mass representation to dorsal frontoparietal, ventral-temporal, and dorsal premotor areas of the cortex. However, upon thorough literary analysis, the regions primarily responsible in this process have been narrowed down to the frontal and parietal regions. The extent to which these brain regions are responsible seems to be task dependent, opening avenues for further research to investigate the regions activated...

Distinct Representations of Subtraction and Multiplication in the Neural Systems for Numerosity and Language - A replication study

Thu, 16 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

A core paradox within cognitive science is the emergence of cultural functions, such as writing systems and arithmetic, that develop across time spans far too short for our neural systems to evolve to support them. Previous work has addressed this question with the neural recycling hypothesis, proposing that these newer functions are mapped onto pre-existing interconnected regions of the brain, called neural circuits. We replicated results from a study exploring the specific functions that have been recycled to allow for symbolic subtraction and multiplication. Original findings suggested that numerosity circuitry, typically responsible for comparing the size or quantity of two groups, is employed for subtraction and verbal processing circuitry for multiplication. We reviewed the collected fMRI data to construct a model of the brain with the region responsible for numerosity localized. We confirmed that the region localized by the numerosity task corresponded to the right intraparietal...

Significant Group-Level Brain Activity during Trail-Making Test Performance

Thu, 16 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The trail-making test (TMT) is a neuropsychological test that is often used to identify cognitive impairment and dementia. This paper replicates a study that utilized the TMT and an fMRI to determine differences in brain activity across 36 healthy participants between the ages of 52 and 85 years old. Two TMTs were given, three trials of TMT-A and three trials of TMT-B, and data was collected on the speed and accuracy of which the participants completed each of the six trials. The replication is focused specifically on determining if there are neuroanatomical regions of the brain that show significantly different activity during the TMT-A and TMT-B, as well as if there was positive or negative activation in those areas. Significant group-level activation in brain regions during the TMT-A versus TMT-B was found using Python, and activation in those significant clusters during both tests was compared using a t-test. The replication yielded different t-statistics compared to the original...

Children’s Use of Gender as a Social Cue: A Replication Study

Thu, 16 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

It has been well researched that social hierarchies can determine the developmental outcomes of young children, but little has been studied about the timing of when children develop an understanding of social hierarchies in their respective communities. It was hypothesized that children believe social status co-varies with gender and is unaffected by in-group bias, and that these beliefs are modulated by the child’s own identity. Using multiple tasks that will be discussed in the methods, the hypotheses were tested on children ages 3.5-6.9 years. Results suggest that children use gender as a social cue for status, and boys show in-group bias whereas girls do not. In today’s social climate, it is important to understand children’s development of beliefs in the context of social hierarchies, such as gender, in order to understand the impact of these concepts on self-image, success, and equity.

Exploration of Subthreshold Beta-Amyloid Levels and Effects on Longitudinal Cognitive Function

Thu, 16 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

While there have been previous studies linking beta-amyloid accumulation in the positive range and cognitive decline, there has yet to be substantial research focusing on the significance of beta-amyloid accumulation in the negative range. The present study aims to replicate the findings of the original paper by Landau et al. 2018 which investigated potential associations between subthreshold levels of beta-amyloid accumulation and decreased executive or memory function. Utilizing data from the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI), longitudinal beta-amyloid accumulation from florbetapir-18 PET scan measurements in cognitively normal individuals and mild cognitively impaired was compared with longitudinal executive and memory function measurements. These findings will provide implications as to whether beta-amyloid accumulation in healthy, cognitively normal individuals may be an earlier indicator of cognitive decline.

‘Fairness Informs Social Decision Making in Infancy’ - Replication

Thu, 16 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Fairness plays a significant role in children’s decision making and also carries meaningful social implications. In this study, our objective is to examine whether sensitivity to fairness develops before infants explicitly show fairness preferences. To further understand this, we replicated Lucca and Pospisil’s (2018) research to test whether infants (13- and 17- month-old infants) prefer to engage with individuals that exhibit fair or unfair behavior. In their study, infants were presented with a novel experimental paradigm in conjunction with video stimuli. Their results suggest that after infants witnessed an individual distribute goods to third parties equally and unequally, infants, both 13 month olds and 17 month olds, actively chose to engage with individuals who distributed goods equally. Given their data, we completed statistical analyses and data manipulation techniques to identify any patterns about inclination towards fair or unfair actors. The Exact Binomial...

Visual Attention Intensifies Emotion: A Replication Study

Thu, 16 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Recent studies have made clear that emotion plays a role in intensifying attention. Mrvka et al. 2019 set out to demonstrate that voluntary attention given to stimuli intensifies the emotion associated with it. In this paper, we report the results from a replication of the first experiment reported in Mrkva et al. (2019), in which participants’ attention was directed toward a target image. In the original experiment, participants were asked to rate the emotional intensity of the target objects. The perceived distinctiveness and the degree to which participants liked each image were also examined to find out whether either parameter mediates the relationship between emotion and attention. In our replication, participants perceived target images as more emotionally intense than control images, corroborating the results of the original experiment and aligning with our expectations. Distinctiveness was also found to have a statistically significant effect on attention, indicating...

Lingering Negative Affect in Response to Daily Stressors in relation with Physical Health Years Later: A Longitudinal Replication

Thu, 16 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Lingering negative affect (negative emotions related to stressors that had occurred the day before) has been introduced in recent years as a potential negative mediator to one’s future physical health. The present study utilized longitudinal data from a community-based, nationwide study (n = 2023) to replicate a previous study on how negative affect that persists after a stressor has occurred is related to future health (Leger et al., Psychological science, 29(B), 1283-1290, 2018). Preliminary findings indicated that while certain values (e.g. means, standard deviation) were different from Leger’s due to inconsistencies in the number of participants (n = 1155) included in the original paper, participants who graduated from high school and above experienced more stressors, and tended to be younger.

A Reversal of Roles: Effects of Visual Attention on Emotion. A replication of Attention drives emotion: Voluntary visual attention increases perceived emotional intensity.

Thu, 16 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Extant research has continually indicated that emotion moderates attention such that attention can be caught, maintained, and/or intensified towards a given emotional object (Mrkva, Westfall, & Van Boven, 2019). However, sparse research has investigated the reverse— whether attention can intensify emotion. To examine the bidirectionality of the relationship between emotional intensity and voluntary attention, we conducted a replication of the Mrkva et al. study on visual attention and emotional intensity. We hypothesized that participants would perceive target images as more emotionally intense than control images, and that their post-search ratings of emotional intensity for each target image would be higher than their pre-search ratings. Each participant was instructed to search for a specific image in a randomized sequence with varying emotional valence in separate trials per participant (Mrkva et al., 2019). Our primary outcome measures were the participants’ self-reported...

A Statistical Replication of the Relationship Between Dimension-Switch and Language Comprehension in Young Children

Tue, 1 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

A Statistical Replication of the Relationship Between Dimension-Switch and Language Comprehension in Young Children

Experiential Stress and Physiological Stress: Implication of Coherence. A Replication and Extension Study

Tue, 1 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

The physiological response to stress and an individual’s subjective perception of stress are two systems vital to enabling adaptive responses to dangerous stimuli and maintaining individual well-being. When the body’s biological stress response and psychological interpretations of stress become misaligned, referred to as a low stress-heart rate coherence, detriments to health can occur (Sommerfeldt et al., 2019). Objective measures of physical stress, such as interleukin-6 and C-reactive protein, pro-inflammatory biomarkers of stress, and heart rate were analyzed in association with self-reported stress, measures of well-being, anxiety, and depression in a pool of Midlife participants from the United States. The present study utilized this data to replicate analyses performed by the original paper, “Individual Differences in the Association Between Subjective Stress and Heart Rate Are Related to Psychological and Physical Well-Being”. Preliminary findings from this effort indicate...

Evaluating the Effects of Fatigue-Induction on Mice’s Cognitive Behavior

Tue, 1 Jun 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Characterized as one of the most commonly distressing symptoms of cancer treatment, cancer-related fatigue (CRF) is reported to be more severe and persistent than “normal” fatigue. CRF has been shown to manifest in higher intensities and longer durations among cancer patients, impair mood and functional abilities, and, most relevantly, correlate with impairments in cognitive functioning, leading to impairments in other areas such as recognition memory and explicit memory. Despite its prevalence, CRF continues to be underreported and untreated due to a lack of information about the biological mechanisms underlying this symptom and its correlated impairments in cognitive systems. In order to uncover these mechanisms, the study conducted by Wolff, et. al. (2020) observed pelvic irradiation’s produced fatigue, and how it affects performance during various cognitive tasks, such as spontaneous altercations and reversal learning, as well as changes in whole-brain levels of mature and...