The interaction of social and perceivable causal factors in shaping ‘over-imitation’

Over-imitation has become a well-documented phenomenon. However there is evidence that both social and visible, physically causal factors can influence the occurrence of over-imitation in children. Here we explore the interplay between these two factors, manipulating both task opacity and social information. Four- to 7-year-old children were given either a causally opaque or transparent box, before which they experienced either (1) a condition where they witnessed a taught, knowledgeable person demonstrate an inefficient method and an untaught model demonstrate a more efficient method; or (2) a baseline condition where they witnessed efficient and inefficient methods performed by two untaught models. Results showed that the level of imitation increased with greater task opacity and when children received social information about knowledgeability consequent on teaching, but only for 6- to 7-year-olds. The findings show that children are selectively attuned to both causal and social factors when learning new cultural knowledge

The Effects of Sleep on the Mental Health and Academic Performance of College Students

My research question was: what is the effect of the amount of sleep college students get on their mental health and academic performance. I was hoping to find out what the effects were and how college students can cope better with the amount of sleep they get. Research was conducted using library and internet resources to locate both primary and secondary research. For this study, I utilized both academic articles and popular internet sources. It was found that the sleep college students obtain affects their lives in many ways including in mental health and academic performance, and this knowledge can be applied to their lives in many ways to improve these aspects of their lives including increasing academic performance and improving mental health. Sleep can be the difference between a higher grade or not and good mental health or not. College students should all make sure that they get enough sleep.https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/fsrs2022/1036/thumbnail.jp

Expression and Function of Inflammation-Associated MicroRNAs in Traumatic Brain Injury

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are important regulators of gene expression. Many neurological diseases, including traumatic brain injury alter expression of miRNAs in the brain. However, the function of these molecules in the context of TBI is largely unknown. Here we report multiple potential roles for miRNAs in TBI, some of which extend beyond the traditional model of post-transcriptional regulation, highlighting that these RNA molecules may have broader implications for the neurobiology of disease. We found that miR-155 plays an essential role in interferon expression after CCI and that miR-155 contributes to TBI induced anxiety, potentially through regulation of interferons. Expression of miR-155 was identified in neuronal nuclei, suggesting additional roles for miR-155 in the neuronal response to injury that may be outside of traditional gene silencing. Similarly, we found that miR-21 was also expressed in neurons. In addition, miR-21 levels were elevated in extracellular vesicles (EVs). Novel roles have recently been elucidated for miRNAs carried in EVs, including stimulation of toll-like receptor 7/8 (TLR 7/8). We identified 3 differentially expressed EV-associated miRNAs with motifs known to mediate TLR 7/8 binding. This suggests that EV-associated miRNAs may act as damage associated molecular patterns (DAMPs) in TBI. Overall, we have identified multiple potential roles for miRNA in TBI that warrant further study. In other studies we found that neurotrophic cytokines IL-6 and CNTF could elicit both Stat3 phosphorylation and miR-21 induction in human neurons, providing a possible mechanism for miR-21 induction in many models of neuronal injury. Additionally, we identified disinhibition and hyperactivity as chronic phenotypes of a mouse model of TBI. This finding will allow for future mechanistic studies of TBI induced impulsivity

Beyond Black and White: Visualizing Cultural Identity Amidst Racial Anxiety and Nativism in American Modernist Novels

Walter Benn Michaels’ Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism highlights that the search for identity is a mutual project of both nativism and Modernism and reveals how relevant racial identity is in American Modernism. While this is an important relationship in American Modernism, I argue that many recent studies following Michaels’ legacy of scholarship on race and nativism in modern American literature reduce individual authors’ projects, too often interpreting them all to have similar anxieties and desires for American racial identity and citing the presence of racial tropes as evidence of the authors’ own social and political arguments. Michaels set a precedent of overlooking the aesthetic in critical examinations of racial identity in American modernist texts, but I argue that aesthetic spaces are often the spaces where authors work through issues of race and identity and that aesthetics are crucial to understanding identity formation in many American modernist novels. Modernism is a movement that explores the idea that identity is not one-dimensional or whole, and I wish to illustrate a more kaleidoscopic view of racial aesthetics in American Modernism, exploring the complexity and variations of race presented by a variety of authors. Various American authors come to both Modernism and race in different ways and have unique projects and perspectives about racial identity. I wish to broaden the scope of conversation surrounding American Modernism and race, and I hope to illuminate the significance of examining the various and unique aesthetic elements at play in individual works of modern American fiction. I will examine works by Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Nella Larsen to argue that race and Modernism have a more complicated relationship than much scholarship acknowledges and that the nativist and racial language and themes presented by many American modernist writers can be read more richly according to the various narrative perspectives and projects of the writers using them

Remembering out-of-context: a developmental perspective.

Contextual influences on memory retrieval are of theoretical and e~pirical importance in infant memory research. Early in infancy, memory is strongly constrained by contextual congruency at encoding and retrieval. Contextual constraints appear to progressively loosen over the infancy period (Hayne, 2004), but little is known about the nature and extent of this change. The present studies revealed that age-related decreases in contextual constraints on memory retrieval extend to both physical and social context, and to recall and recognition memory (Experiments 1-4). Specifically, for 9-month-olds both recognition and recall memory were less affected by a change of social context than for 6-month- . olds, and for 12-month-olds, recognition memory was less influenced by a change of global physical context than for 6-month-olds. At 12-months, memory retrieval appeared to be particularly constrained by intrinsic contextual details, a constraint that was robust across procedural variations that alleviate context-shift effects in other age-groups (Experiment 5). Nonetheless, providing infants with a unique environment for learning and retrieval helped them to retrieve memory across an intrinsic contextual change, indicating that extrinsic context may perform a disambiguating function later in infancy (Experiment 6). Finally, Experiments 7 to 9 used an EEG study to explore the processes underlying contextual influences on memory retrieval with adults. A change ofioom selectively impaired the purported neural correlates ofrecollective-based recognition memory, indicating that investigating the development ofrecollection in infancy may be an important step towards understanding contextual influences on memory in development. Taken together, these studies show that sirililar contextual features are encoded in memory from infancy to adulthood. Contextual details exert progressively less influence over memory retrieval over the first year of life, likely through a combination ofboth the maturation ofbrain regions involved in memory, and experience oflearning and remembering in a variety of settings