Marshall University Music Department Presents a BFA Junior Recital, Dustin Moraczewski, guitar

https://mds.marshall.edu/music_perf/1514/thumbnail.jp

Functional organization of social-motivation brain systems during social interaction in autism spectrum disorder

The motivation to interact with others and the feeling of reward following a social interaction is integral to the development and maintenance of successful so- cial relationships. For those with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) successful social interaction is often more challenging relative to those who are neurotypical (NT) and atypical social reward processing may contribute to such deficits. However, our understanding of the relationship between brain systems associated with re- ward and higher-order social-cognitive processing during both typical and atypical development is limited. Middle childhood is an important time to examine the de- velopment of the functional relationship between these brain systems as this is a time when children’s social worlds expand in size and complexity and those with ASD often fall behind. The goal of the current dissertation is to characterize the development of the functional relationship between the ventral striatum (VS)—a hub of reward processing—and other brain regions implicated in reward and social-cognitive processing during an interactive social context in middle childhood. Using novel Bayesian multilevel modeling, Aim 1 examines VS functional connectivity within the NT group while Aim 2 examines group differences between the ASD and NT groups. Finally, given that heterogeneity is ubiquitous in both NT and ASD populations, Aim 3 takes a dimensional perspective through examining VS connectivity as a function of individual differences in autistic traits and subjective reports of social reward within the entire sample. Results suggest that participant age may be particularly important for the development of the relationship between reward and social-cognitive brain systems, such that older children of both groups exhibit greater sensitivity the absence of a social reward and to the contingency of a non-social reward. This dissertation underscores the importance of examining multidimensional heterogeneity in both NT and ASD populations

Marshall University Music Department Presents the Marshall University Guitar Ensemble Recital

https://mds.marshall.edu/music_perf/1511/thumbnail.jp

A bipolar taxonomy of adult human brain sulcal morphology related to timing of fetal sulcation and trans-sulcal gene expression gradients

We developed a computational pipeline (now provided as a resource) for measuring morphological similarity between cortical surface sulci to construct a sulcal phenotype network (SPN) from each magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan in an adult cohort (N=34,725; 45-82 years). Networks estimated from pairwise similarities of 40 sulci on 5 morphological metrics comprised two clusters of sulci, represented also by the bipolar distribution of sulci on a linear-to-complex dimension. Linear sulci were more heritable and typically located in unimodal cortex; complex sulci were less heritable and typically located in heteromodal cortex. Aligning these results with an independent fetal brain MRI cohort (N=228; 21-36 gestational weeks), we found that linear sulci formed earlier, and the earliest and latest-forming sulci had the least between-adult variation. Using high-resolution maps of cortical gene expression, we found that linear sulcation is mechanistically underpinned by trans-sulcal gene expression gradients enriched for developmental processes.</p

DSST fmriprep Helpers

&lt;p&gt;This repo provides shell scripts to help summarize fmriprep error reports across an entire dataset and to generate motion censor files from the fmriprep confounds.&lt;/p&gt

RStan Associative Learning Models

Associative learning models fit using Rstan for the manuscript Gorka et al. "Periaqueductal gray matter responses reflect negative prediction errors during the omission of aversive outcomes

Separable neural representations of sound sources: Speaker identity and musical timbre

Human listeners can quickly and easily recognize different sound sources (objects and events) in their environment. Understanding how this impressive ability is accomplished can improve signal processing and machine intelligence applications along with assistive listening technologies. However, it is not clear how the brain represents the many sounds that humans can recognize (such as speech and music) at the level of individual sources, categories and acoustic features. To examine the cortical organization of these representations, we used patterns of fMRI responses to decode 1) four individual speakers and instruments from one another (separately, within each category), 2) the superordinate category labels associated with each stimulus (speech or instrument), and 3) a set of simple synthesized sounds that could be differentiated entirely on their acoustic features. Data were collected using an interleaved silent steady state sequence to increase the temporal signal-to-noise ratio, and mitigate issues with auditory stimulus presentation in fMRI. Largely separable clusters of voxels in the temporal lobes supported the decoding of individual speakers and instruments from other stimuli in the same category. Decoding the superordinate category of each sound was more accurate and involved a larger portion of the temporal lobes. However, these clusters all overlapped with areas that could decode simple, acoustically separable stimuli. Thus, individual sound sources from different sound categories are represented in separate regions of the temporal lobes that are situated within regions implicated in more general acoustic processes. These results bridge an important gap in our understanding of cortical representations of sounds and their acoustics

The positive-negative mode link between brain connectivity, demographics, and behavior: A pre-registered, replication of Smith et al. (2015)

A study seeking to replicate the positive-negative mode in an independent sample of children from the ABCD study