Rats and mice rapidly update timed behaviors

Keeping track of time intervals is a crucial aspect of behavior and cognition. Many theoretical models of how the brain times behavior make predictions for steady-state performance of well-learned intervals, but the rate of learning intervals in these models varies greatly, ranging from one-shot learning to learning over thousands of trials. Here, we explored how quickly rats and mice adapt to changes in interval durations using a serial fixed-interval task. In the first experiment, animals experienced randomly selected fixed-intervals of 12, 24, 36, 48, or 60 s, for blocks ranging from 13 to 21 trials. Consistent with previous work, animals abruptly increased lever pressing as reward availability approached, and these \u27start times\u27 scaled with the interval duration for both species. We then quantified the rate of updating to new trial durations and found that rodents consistently updated their start times within 2-3 trials following a change in interval duration, before stabilizing their behavior by the third or fourth trial. To account for repeated exposures to fixed-interval durations, a second set of animals was tested with new fixed-intervals after being trained on the serial fixed-interval task described above. Next, a third group was trained on fixed-interval durations that were generated de novo in each day. In each of these contexts, rodents rapidly increased or decreased their start times to mirror new FI durations following exposure to 1-2 trials of new intervals following block transitions. This work adds to growing evidence for rapid duration learning across species, highlighting the need for timing models to be capable of rapid updating in dynamic temporal scenarios

Mālama I Ka Loʻi Kalo: Kānaka Hawaiʻi Health and Wellbeing Within the Continental U.S. Hawaiian Diaspora

Among diasporic Kānaka Hawaiʻi born and raised in the continental United States, many experience isolation and imposter syndrome about Hawaiian heritage, due to a lack of accessibility to traditional practices, cultural education and ways of knowing; and isolation from the Hawaiian community. While not unique to Diasporic Kānaka Hawaiʻi, many of these issues occur more prominently as a result of migration away from familial, cultural, spiritual, and educational support networks, and increased proximity to U.S. settler culture. In the Hawaiian health and wellbeing model titled, The Ahupuaʻa Model (Daniels et al. 2022), these support networks are supposed to serve as “protective factors” to the trauma of colonization, systemic poverty, and violence which determine Hawaiian health and wellbeing. In addition, protective factors are meant to uplift Hawaiian conceptions of health, including interconnected spiritual, cultural, mental, familial, and intergenerational. However, access to protective factors in the Ahupuaʻa Model are much more attainable and realistic in Hawaiʻi than in the continental U.S. Therefore, after identifying these distinct Hawaiian wellbeing issues linked with migration, the question becomes: how does the Ahupuaʻa Model shift when factoring in the Diasporic experience? In assessing this question, we can begin looking forward to protective factor development: what protective factors have already developed in the Diaspora? What practices do we have to implement to sustainably create and support protective factors that address these Diasporic issues? By addressing these issues, I hope to promote the creation of wellbeing support and resources for Kānaka Hawaiʻi living in the Diaspora

Insight Into an Ancient Plate Boundary: A Structural Investigation of the Granite Wash Mountains (Arizona, U.S.A.)

The Maria fold-and-thrust belt in the Mojave-Sonoran deserts of SE California and west-central Arizona preserves multi-deformed rocks involved in Jurassic (ca. 165-140 Ma), Cretaceous (ca. 120-100 Ma) and Cretaceous-Eocene ( ca. 80-40 Ma) tectonic events that affected southwestern North America. An ongoing debate remains on the plate organization and geodynamics of the western North American margin during the Late Cretaceous through the Eocene. In the Granite Wash Mountains (AZ), thrust faults associated with Cretaceous crustal shortening are overprinted and cross-cut by ductile shear zones. Shear zones strike dominantly NW-SE, mirroring Miocene (ca. 20-15 Ma) low-angle detachment faults in the region and raising questions as to their genetic relationships with these structures. In the southern Granite Wash and Little Harquahala ranges, metasedimentary fabrics co-located with the Cretaceous-aged Hercules Thrust system are cross-cut by syn-kinematic dykes that show map-scale s-fabrics, suggesting possible NW-SE transtensional motion. The Tank Pass Granite pluton (ca. 70 Ma), previously thought to have been undeformed, preserves evidence of both top-NE and top-SW shearing and macroscale S-C fabrics, which we present here with new fine-scale geologic mapping, field relationships, and stereograms. These structural relationships between shear zones and their host materials lay the foundation for future work targeting the temperature conditions via microstructural analysis and ages of deformation preserved in these shear zones

The Magic of Decolonization

Using a single line in Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1961) as a jumping-off point, this article meditates on the decolonial possibilities of Afro-Atlantic religions and their associated ritual objects. In it, I argue not that Afro-Atlantic works are inherently opposed to colonial epistemes but rather that moralizing colonial regimes’ exercises of power has forced their association with the concept “magic” and, in turn, the institutional critiques that “magic” creates. As such, I speculate on the forms of ontological uprooting necessitated by a full reckoning with Afro-Atlantic spiritualities—or what the institutional structures noted above might characterize as “Black magic”—may afford the disciplines of art history and material culture

HKC01 - Title

Abstract for Working Paper HKC01

Hypersexualization and Disproportionate Punishments of Black Girls in All-Girl Catholic High Schools

Faculty in private Catholic all-girls high schools in the US enforce a standard of modesty that they feel Black girls tarnish. The constant adultification and hypersexualization of Black girls in US society - especially in learning settings - regularly disrupts their education. Studies reveal that faculty responses are derived from a long history of objectification, criminalization, stereotypes, and over-sexualization of young Black girls and women. Using a sociological lens, this study adopts an autoethnographic methodology to offer a nuanced perspective on my experiences in the context of the existing scholarship of Monique W. Morris, Catalina Carpan, and Robin M. Boylorn