Affective valence influences both our cognition and our perception of the world. For example, the speed and quality with which we recognize objects in a …
Neurocognitive aging is associated with distinct patterns of changes in task-related brain activities in the aging brain. However, the brain mechanisms underpinning such changes are …
Abstract of Aging Effects on Task-Evoked Pupillary Reponses, by Mingjian He, Degree ScM., Brown University, May 2018. Previous studies have found decreased cell counts and …
Biological brains are dynamic. Recent advances in electrophysiology and neuroimaging have helped uncover various mechanisms through which brains construct and utilize rich variations in neural …
In order to navigate a complex web of relationships, an individual must learn and represent the connections between people in a social network. However, the …
Humans are remarkably adept at generalizing knowledge between experiences in a way that can be difficult for computers. Often, this entails generalizing constituent pieces of …
A wealth of research shows how the dopaminergic frontostriatal system incrementally learns from<br/> rewards and punishments. Midbrain dopamine cells show phasic firing rate changes in …
How synaptic plasticity in-vivo manages diverse properties of biological neural networks remains poorly understood. My collaborators and I address this by examining basic models of …
In the current project, I examined how efficiently people learn social norms. Specifically, I investigated the relative learning efficiency for social norms by comparing it …
This dissertation primarily contributes to the visualization and visual analytics community. It offers findings and methods to expand the visualization design space and to deepen …
Psychostimulant drugs including amphetamines have been employed for a wide range of applications across diverse populations. These include prescription medications for conditions such as ADHD …
Perception of the 3D world is intuitive and effortless. The visual system is capable of processing the complexities in the retinal image to produce percepts …
In this thesis, I explore how objects affect the space around them. I show that spatial information is extracted from even completely novel objects. Information …
The medial temporal lobe (MTL) plays important roles in humans and animal cognition, for example, in episodic memory and spatial navigation. In rodents, two prominent …
Current models of cognitive control propose that the capacity to control one’s ongoing thoughts and actions is supported by a response threshold adjustment process involving …
Data from lesion studies, anatomical connections, and functional recordings suggest that the postrhinal cortex (POR) has a role in encoding and recognizing context for memory. …
This study performs a systematic comparison of the information content in single unit activity (SUA) and low-and high-frequency local field potentials (lf-LFP <2Hz, and hf-LFPs >40Hz, respectively) in …</2hz,>
This thesis examines the cognitive consequences of sleep loss in the context of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) symptom severity in children. We used a wake extension …
Understanding the activation pattern and the functional network of the brain under experimental conditions or resting-state is fundamental to brain research, which has been shown …
How do humans learn to adaptively function in a fundamentally uncertain social world? Since we cannot directly observe the contents of other people’s minds, the …