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Sample List of Graduate Student Research - Brent Costleigh (M.S. '07, now at Brookdale Community College)
HIV patients treated with drugs that suppress the replication of the virus are living longer and productive lives, but evidence suggests that the brain may still be affected by the virus. HIV patients that abuse drugs may be especially vulnerable to the brain damaging effects of the virus. In my master's thesis I am studying noninfectious rats with the HIV-1 transgene (that is, rats that have been genetically engineered to contain all of the genes of the HIV-1 virus except for those needed to replicate and infect, making them noninfectious). I am investigating whether these HIV-1 transgenic rats respond differently than controls to metamphetamine, a very common drug among drug addicts and recreational drug users. I am using two procedures that are very popular in the field of neuroscience for investigating drug abuse in animals: "conditioned place preference" and tests of "behavioral sensitization".
- Greg Cvasa
Autobiographical memory is the recollection of facts and events that have been interpreted and integrated into a consistent story about one’s self. Repeated studies have shown that the characteristics of the audience are an important factor that influences narrative structure and content. This makes sense in that auto-biographical remembering frequently occurs in social contexts and is often an interpersonal phenomenon (Nelson & Fivush, 2000). This social context of remembering has long been viewed as an important motivator in the ways we tell our stories. In fact, both speaker and listener characteristics can influence what memory is used for, as well as the extent to which a social function is served (Fivush, Brotman, Buckner, & Goodman, 2000).
Studies involving autobiographical memory utilize one of two techniques in order to elicit narratives from participants: oral or written. When written narratives are employed, participants are often asked to write their memories on their own time and in a location they choose. Participants are also frequently given anywhere from a few days to up to a week to return their memories back to the experimenter. Subsequently, there is little to no control over the temporal, physical, and/or social context in which the participants write their narratives. Furthermore, participants concurrently lack the presence of the experimenter who would influence the structure and content of the narratives; instead, they relate their memory in a static and impersonal setting, which may possibly lead to a different kind of narrative report than one that would be shared in the presence of others. Typically speaking, there is no rationale why certain methods are utilized over others when autobiographical narratives are collected.
In my current research, I am exploring whether the physical presence of a listener is a factor in written narratives. I would also like to investigate this aspect of recall context further by examining how group settings for written recall affect narrative reports versus solitary narrative writing. Specifically, I would like to determine how the written narratives we tell are influenced by the presence of not just the experimenter, but of peers who are also participating in the same setting. This look at narrative collection methodology may serve to inform future research on how to better elicit written narratives from research participants.
- Jacqueline Holloway (M.S. '06, now at the Integrative Neuroscience Program UMDNJ/Rutgers)
Are there differences in learning between women and men? Do hormones affect reflexive responding to aversive stimuli (i.e. loud bursts of noise)? Working in collaboration with faculty from Stress and Motivated Behavior Institute at UMDNJ (Drs. Kevin Beck & Rick Servatius), I have been exploring these and other questions for my master’s thesis at Seton Hall University. Previous studies have shown that women exhibit less of a startle response when their hormone levels are low, similar to responding exhibited by men. This is known as pre-pulse inhibition (PPI) of the acoustic startle response. In contrast, when hormone levels are elevated, women have been shown to startle more to aversive stimuli than their low-hormone counterparts. Since PPI of the acoustic startle response is modulated by the area of the brain known as the hippocampus, I am looking to see if these phase and gender differences are found in another hippocampally modulated motor response. I have chosen a human eyeblink conditioning discrimination task. My aim is to replicate the PPI findings and to expand on them by measuring rates of acquisition using the classical eyeblink conditioning procedure. Understanding hormone effects on neurological substrates, specifically the hippocampus, has potential implications for research on disorders such as depression, schizophrenia, and Alzheimer’s disease.
- Rosa Kyek
Working with Dr. Amy Silvestri has greatly increased my interest in behavioral studies with rats. Currently, I am working on examining the effects of REM sleep deprivation on performance in the Morris water maze task. In addition, I perform surgeries several times a week for animals used in a study exploring the function of D-Cycloserine infusions into the prefrontal cortex region on fear aquisition and extinction. This is especially interesting because it is often used as a model for Post-Traumatic-Stress-Disorder. In the future I plan to investigate further pharmacological challenges for use in fear conditioning.
- Paul Ladny (M.S. '07, now in the Cognitive Science doctoral program at Mississsippi State)
My current interest is in the area of retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF), specifically in relation to how manipulation of time affects this type of forgetting. RIF is a theory that considers why it is that when we repetitively recall more obscure examples of a category (e.g., pomegranate for fruit), examples that are more commonly associated to that category are subjected to retrieval inhibition (e.g., banana for fruit), which causes us to ‘forget’ those more common examples for a temporary period of time. Now, while this is cool in itself to me, what really makes the theory of RIF stand apart from its competitors, is that it predicts that the more commonly associated example will be temporarily forgotten for all categories that it belongs to, and not just the single category that it was tested with. For example, repetitively recalling pomegranate as a type of fruit is likely to impair the ability of the naïve participant to not only recall the example of banana as a type of fruit, but banana as being associated with monkeys, banana as being associated with yellow foods, etc. My question is, exactly how long do we forget the term banana for?
- Abigail Lashomb (M.S. '07 now at Schering-Plough Research Institute )
My research involvement at Seton Hall is a collaboration between the psychology and biology departments. I am working with HIV-1 transgenic rats to examine general biological and behavioral changes that may occur in response to HIV infection. This newly developed non-infectious transgenic rat line has the full HIV-1 genome incorporated into their genes except for the genes that make the virus infectious. I have examined the rats' performance in learning and memory tests (e.g., Morris water maze & fear conditioning) as well as in general behavioral tasks such as running and food intake. I am designing experiments to test the rats' responsiveness to drugs and to examine the possible impact of HIV infection on drug seeking or addictive behavior. (See student profile here...)
- Andrew LeBlanc
The research I am involved in examines the role of perception and visuomotor learning in carrying out visually-guided actions. In order to carry out a visually-guided action, locations in space that are encoded into visual coordinates by our perceptual systems must be translated into motor coordinates centered upon the part of the body carrying out the action. This translation is called a visuomotor adaptation. Our everyday experience allows for the development of an efficient translation process between the vision and action systems. Normal growth or brain injury, however, can disrupt this translation, interrupting visually-guided actions. My research examines whether learning visually guided actions in one area of visual space will transfer to another area of visual space, as well as whether there are longer-lasting effects if vision is displaced (with prisms) to one direction or the other. I am testing subjects for this study in the Stroke Rehabilitation Research Laboratory at the Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation.
- David Root (M.S. '06, now in the doctoral program in Behavioral Neuroscience, Rutgers University)
The goals of my master's thesis are to determine the role of the dorsolateral striatum in the development and maintenance of habitual operant responding and to investigate whether responding for ethanol differs from responding for a natural reward. Administration of intracerebral lidocaine via bilateral cannulae was used to temporarily and reversibly lesion the dorsolateral striatum at distinct learning phases of operant responding. Critical techniques used in my M.S. thesis were stereotaxic cannulation surgery, bilateral infusion of drug via Hamilton syringes, perfusion, tissue staining, histology, and other behavioral neuroscience techniques. I also worked with Drs. Chang (Biology) and Vigorito (Psychology) on experiments investigating the neurobehavioral characteristics of the HIV-1 transgenic rat.
- Gina Sportiello
Aggression and the research that has been conducted on it for many years has always been of interest to me. I have done extensive research on aggression and gender differences, particularly with relational aggression, over the years and wanted to further explore this behavior. In particular, I wanted to focus on the way in which individuals perceive aggressive acts and how these perceptions may be influenced by gender. Gender has been an important topic in Psychology and often a hot topic of discussion, and I have always found myself intrigued by it and its many layers. My work at Seton Hall has focused on the ways in which the exact same aggressive act may be perceived differently if the “perceivers” are of differing genders. Is one gender more accepting of aggression as an appropriate behavior? Does one gender, on average, view this aggressive act as more intense and harmful to those who are victims of it? Also, I am interested in better understanding the way in which aggressive acts are perceived if the aggressor’s gender differs in each situation. It is important for these ideas to be explored in order to understand why many forms of aggression are tolerated in our society and how it can affect us in so many different ways. When two people assess the same situation in two very different ways, we need to understand what the reasoning behind their assessment is and see how it can affect those involved. An interesting way to think of the “real world” effects of this type of study is to think about a court case. Will a jury view an aggressive act as less aggressive when performed by a female than when it is performed by a male? Can this lead to an unfair judgment? I want to know more about people and the way in which they perceive the world around them. By studying aggression and its interaction with gender, I have been able to gain a greater understanding of this.
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