The impact of evaluative pressure and higher working memory capacity on sensorimotor skill performance.

Underperformance in high-pressure situations, commonly known as choking under pressure, has been well-documented in the literature. For well-learned sensorimotor skills, such as sports, choking is thought to occur because individuals devote explicit attention to the steps of the skill, which disrupts performance. The current study examines how the type of pressure situation an individual experiences, and individual differences in working memory capacity, influence choking on a sensorimotor skill. Participants (N = 96) performed a Sensorimotor Reaction Time Task (SRTT) either under monitoring pressure, outcome pressure, or no pressure (control). High working-memory individuals performed significantly worse while completing the SRTT under monitoring pressure relative to outcome pressure. Low working-memory individuals performed marginally better than high working-memory individuals under monitoring pressure. These findings demonstrate that high working-memory negatively impacts sensorimotor skill performance in monitoring pressure situations. Furthermore, these results show how monitoring pressure leads to decreases in performance in high working-memory individuals due to enhancing the amount of attention these individuals direct to task execution

Constructing Meaning in Movement Through its Relationship to Music : A Choreomusical Response to the Sarabande

A long-time performer with the Mark Morris Dance Group, I have received praise for the musicality inherent in my dancing. This refined musicality developed over decades of working with Morris—an artist known for his choreomusicality. Drawing from the pedagogic techniques Morris uses to train his dancers, I also employ a musical approach when teaching dance technique classes and have distilled these principles of musicality in a journal article written for dance educators. In this MFA thesis project, I now apply the musical principles utilized in my performance and pedagogic techniques toward a choreographic endeavor. The dance and musical form, sarabande, serves as a vehicle for this choreographic process. In one regard, I tend to the concepts of beat, tempo, meter, accent, duration, articulation, rhythm, and phrasing during movement invention to supply my dance with intrinsic drama. Intermixed with this rhythmically rooted methodology is an influence from knowledge developed through academic research about the sarabande’s origins, migration, and transformation through time and locale. The final choreographic product invites a conversation among historical, musicological, and compositional elements and aims to shed light on this multilayered musical form while providing meaning and delight beyond the pure facts of music and movement

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The new arcade bar in the East Village takes us back to the good days

Infusing shame resilience into the counseling curriculum to support client conceptualization and student wellness

Shame is a silent epidemic that influences the health of our clients and the counselors who serve them. Using the tenets of phenomenology, researchers explored the experiences of students participating in a counseling course created to infuse shame resilience into the curriculum. Results and implications for future research are included

Decolonising Borderwork: Indigenous Knowledges, Agencies, And Sustainable Agricultural Development In Uganda

Whereas little research has traced the displacement and relocation of Indigenous peoples engaged in subsistence agriculture generally in Africa, even less has examined what happens to Indigenous knowledge when such communities are forced to relocate, particularly with respect to their knowledge about traditional farming practices. Yet, when we consider the cultural capacities, skills, and knowledges brought by Indigenous peoples who are forced to relocate, we can begin to inquire about their untapped potential, and their agency to pursue their own (agricultural) development, and to bolster their own resilience and adaptation strategies to the impacts of environmental change, as active participants and co-creators of borderwork. This article seeks to respond to gaps in decolonial migration and development literature, policy, and practice by asserting the need to consider the role that Indigenous knowledge could play in advancing the sustainable agricultural development, and thus climate-resilience, of Indigenous peoples who are displaced and the societies and areas that they relocate to. Offering a case study of three districts (Isingiro, Ntungamo and Rakai) in the climate-vulnerable, ethnically rich, and migrant and refugee-dense southwestern region of Uganda, this article concludes with a call for re-imagining, and for further research into, the role that displaced Indigenous peoples and communities—their agricultural knowledge, capacities, and ties to the land—could play in expanding the hermeneutic capacity and usefulness of the notion of borderwork for sustainable development policies and practices

Cryopreservation of tissue engineered skeletal muscle

Tissue engineered skeletal muscle plays an important role not only in the field of regenerative medicine, but also in emerging areas such as soft robotics, organ-on-a-chip models of disease, and drug testing. However, further expansion of the applications of tissue engineered skeletal muscle models will require a suitable method for their long-term storage and shipment. Cryopreservation has long been the standard for long-term cell storage, but when it comes to the freezing of 3D tissues, many complications arise due to heat and mass transfer limitations. Here, we use a tissue engineered skeletal muscle bioactuator as a model to characterize the effects of freezing on skeletal muscle viability, gene expression, myotube structure, and force generation. We optimize the freezing medium composition and compare the effects of freezing on both undifferentiated and differentiated engineered skeletal muscle tissue constructs. We report an optimized protocol of freezing skeletal muscle constructs while undifferentiated, which not only maintains cell viability, but leads to a 3-fold increase in force production as compared to unfrozen muscle. The reported timeline for skeletal muscle tissue fabrication, freezing, and revival not only promotes a more streamlined fabrication process, but will further enable collaborative research efforts through the shipment of pre-formed skeletal muscle constructs

The Boundaries of Adaptive Control

Cognitive control processes that enable purposeful behavior are often context-specific. An individual, for example, may inhibit the tendency to speak loudly at a restaurant but not at a party. However, the nature of contextual boundaries for cognitive control processes remains unclear. For instance, it remains unclear as to why repeating contextual features enhances the congruency sequence effect (CSE), a common index of adaptive control, whereas alternating such features reduces this effect. To address such ambiguities, we sought to distinguish among various (and often conflicting) hypotheses concerning the boundaries of the CSE. In Chapters 2 and 3, we investigated the role of target-defining features and task sets in engendering or amplifying the CSE, respectively. Based on our findings, in Chapters 4 and 5 we explored whether task sets or episodic contexts determine the boundaries of the CSE. Interestingly, both studies suggested that task sets, rather than episodic context alone, determine the boundaries of the CSE. Thus, in Chapter 6, we further investigated the role of task sets in the context of episodic retrieval and action control. Contrary to prior studies, our findings suggested that non-hierarchical bindings between features – as opposed to hierarchical task sets – provide an explanation for task set boundaries of the CSE. Taken together, these studies provide a comprehensive overview on the boundaries of adaptive control.PHDPsychologyUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/170039/1/ldgran_1.pd