Teaching and Research at Northwest Indian College from a Student Perspective

At Northwest Indian College place-based learning and relevant research are used to engage and retain Native students. In the classroom, sense of place is often derived from the Salish Sea. This creates a classroom experience that is connected to a real place that students have deep connection to. This also applies to students who are from different regions, students learn how they can use these classroom and research experiences in their own communities after graduation. In the Salish Sea Research Center students engage in research that directly relates to the wellbeing of Indigenous nations. The result of placed-based pedagogy and engagement in compelling research will be presented from a student perspective

Assessing the Impacts of Clam Gardens on Invertebrate Species Diversity in the Salish Sea

The world’s oceans are impacted by human interactions that create largely negative consequences, however Indigenous societies have developed technologies and management practices that have been shown to have positive benefits on ecosystems and have sustained resources for millennia. One such technology is clam gardens; clam gardens are rock wall structures constructed by First Nations people within the intertidal area that trap sediment and extend the area for productive clam growth. Clam gardens have been shown to increase the abundance and growth rate of clams when compared to non-walled beaches. While researchers have primarily focused on how clam gardens have increased the productivity of clams, the rock wall structure may also alter conditions for other invertebrate species. In fact, ethnographic studies have shown that clam gardens had multiple purposes besides being productive bivalve habitats. To better understand the ecological role of clam gardens, this study quantified invertebrate community structure on a clam garden rock wall and compared it to a control non-walled beach with similar tidal height and wave energy. This research shows that the clam garden rock wall has greater invertebrate diversity and a different ecological community structure than similar non-walled beaches. This study acts as an example of how traditional technologies can aid in maintaining complex marine invertebrate communities. In this way, we can look to First Nations technologies that have worked for millennia and see how they may be implemented in modern applications to create sustainable solutions that can positively impact resilient ecosystems

Clam Terrace Rock Walls: The Ecology and Social Significance of Monumental Places

When we think of the monumental works of the indigenous peoples of the Northwest Coast, we typically think of long houses, canoes, and totem poles. But the First Peoples are also monumental movers of stone in the making of resource sites like clam terraces and root gardens. Clam terraces are special places that enhance beaches for clam production, and are used to harvest not only clams but an entire suite of algae and animals. While many studies have focused on the ability of clam gardens to enhance clam productivity, few have examined the role of the rock wall itself. These stories describe the monumental work of Indigenous peoples of the Northwest Coast to create these rock wall structures, indelibly shaping land and seascapes with their creation and inscribing the physical world with visible records of familial connections to places, while significantly managing food resources. In other words, the moving of stone at this monumental scale entangles the production of key foods with the making histories and places. These stories highlight the importance of these features in shaping our seascapes as well as our ecosystems. By creating new habitat, rock walls change intertidal ecological communities and alter the availability of non-clam food species, bringing foods like crab, urchin, seaweeds, and octopus into the garden and onto the plate

Fearful faces drive gaze-cueing and threat bias effects in children on the lookout for danger

Most developmental studies of face emotion processing show faces in isolation, in the absence of any broader context. Here we investigate two types of interactions between expression and threat contexts. First, in adults, following of another person's direction of social attention is increased when that person shows fear and the context requires vigilance for danger. We investigate whether this also occurs in children. Using a Posner-style eye-gaze cueing paradigm, we tested whether children would show greater gaze-cueing from fearful than happy expressions when the task was to be vigilant for possible dangerous animals. Testing across the 8-12-year-old age range, we found this fear priority effect was absent in the youngest children but developed to reach adult levels in the oldest children. However, even the oldest children were unable to sustain fear-prioritization when the onset of the target was delayed. Second, we addressed the development of 'threat bias' - namely faster identification of dangerous animals than safe animals - in the social context provided by expressive faces. In our non-anxious samples (i.e. with typical-population levels of anxiety), adults showed a threat bias regardless of the expression or looking direction of the just-seen cue face whereas 8-12-year-olds only showed a threat bias when the just-seen cue face displayed fear. Overall, the results argue that some, but not all, aspects of expression-context interactions are mature by 12 years of age. We measured gaze-cueing (RTinvalid-direction-trials minus RTvalid-direction-trials) and threat-bias effects from fearful (pictured) and happy faces in a context that required vigilance for danger (decide if a target animal is safe or dangerous; dangerous spider pictured). The ability to prioritize fearful-gaze in the danger-vigilance context emerged over the 8-12-year-old age range. Children also showed an adult-like threat bias for dangerous over safe animals specifically in the context of fearful faces. Overall, our results present some of the first evidence of context-expression interactions in children, and argue that studies of isolated face or threat stimuli may not apply to real-world behavior, in which contextual factors abound

Elevated levels of callous unemotional traits are associated with reduced attentional cueing, with no specificity for fear or eyes

Three theoretical explanations for the affective facet of psychopathy were tested in individuals with high levels of callous unemotional (CU) traits. Theory 1 (Blair) proposes specific difficulties in processing others' distress (particularly fear). Theory 2 (Dadds) argues for lack of attention to the eyes of faces. Theory 3 (Newman) proposes enhanced selective attention. The theories make contrasting predictions about how CU traits would affect cueing of attention from eye-gaze direction in distressed (i.e., fearful) faces; eye-gaze direction in nondistressed (i.e., happy, neutral) faces; and nonsocial stimuli (arrows). High CU adults (n = 33) showed reduced attentional cueing compared with low CU adults (n = 75) equally across all conditions (eye-gaze in distressed and nondistressed faces, arrows). The high CU group's ability to suppress following of eye-gaze emerged with practice while the low CU group showed no such reduction in gaze-cueing with practice. Overall accuracy and RTs were not different for the low and high CU groups indicating equivalent task engagement. Results support an enhanced selective attention account - consistent with Newman and colleagues' Response Modulation Hypothesis - in which high CU individuals are able to suppress goal-irrelevant social and nonsocial information. The current study also provides novel evidence regarding the nature of gaze-following by tracking practice effects across blocks. While supporting the common assumption that following of gaze is typically mandatory, the results also imply this can be modified by individual differences in personality

Clinical presentation of 13 patients with subtelomeric rearrangements and a review of the literature.

To re-examine the potential clinical indications for subtelomeric FISH testing and to provide additional cases to the growing literature on subtelomeric abnormalities and their genotype-phenotype correlations, we present a single center case series of 13 patients with chromosomal abnormalities detected by subtelomeric FISH testing over a 21 month period. The most common abnormality involved chromosome 1p (23%). Partial monosomy was present in 69% of the patients, complex rearrangements in 23%, and partial trisomy in 8%. The mean time from first normal karyotype to positive subtelomeric FISH result was 3.8 years (n = 11, median 3.5 years, range: 6 months-10 years). One patient had an abnormal high resolution karyotype recognized retrospectively, and two other patients had abnormal karyotypes that were fully deciphered only after subtelomeric FISH analysis. Eighty five percent of cases occurred de novo. The subtelomeric FISH results were useful for adjusting the recurrence risks and helping to focus medical screening and monitoring. The results impacted family planning and satisfied families in search of a diagnosis. Our findings support the use of subtelomeric FISH analysis as a second tier test in patients suspected of having a chromosomal abnormality with a normal karyotype. Potential benefits of subtelomeric FISH testing include faster time to diagnosis, better informed patient prognosis, and more accurate genetic counseling

Perceived emotion genuineness: normative ratings for popular facial expression stimuli and the development of perceived-as-genuine and perceived-as-fake sets

In everyday social interactions, people’s facial expressions sometimes reflect genuine emotion (e.g., anger in response to a misbehaving child) and sometimes do not (e.g., smiling for a school photo). There is increasing theoretical interest in this distinction, but little is known about perceived emotion genuineness for existing facial expression databases. We present a new method for rating perceived genuineness using a neutral-midpoint scale (–7 = completely fake; 0 = don’t know; +7 = completely genuine) that, unlike previous methods, provides data on both relative and absolute perceptions. Normative ratings from typically developing adults for five emotions (anger, disgust, fear, sadness, and happiness) provide three key contributions. First, the widely used Pictures of Facial Affect (PoFA; i.e., “the Ekman faces”) and the Radboud Faces Database (RaFD) are typically perceived as not showing genuine emotion. Also, in the only published set for which the actual emotional states of the displayers are known (via self-report; the McLellan faces), percepts of emotion genuineness often do not match actual emotion genuineness. Second, we provide genuine/fake norms for 558 faces from several sources (PoFA, RaFD, KDEF, Gur, FacePlace, McLellan, News media), including a list of 143 stimuli that are event-elicited (rather than posed) and, congruently, perceived as reflecting genuine emotion. Third, using the norms we develop sets of perceived-as-genuine (from event-elicited sources) and perceived-as-fake (from posed sources) stimuli, matched on sex, viewpoint, eye-gaze direction, and rated intensity. We also outline the many types of research questions that these norms and stimulus sets could be used to answe

Adaptive Face Coding Contributes to Individual Differences in Facial Expression Recognition Independently of Affective Factors

There are large, reliable individual differences in the recognition of facial expressions of emotion across the general population. The sources of this variation are not yet known. We investigated the contribution of a key face perception mechanism, adaptive coding, which calibrates perception to optimize discrimination within the current perceptual “diet.” We expected that a facial expression system that readily recalibrates might boost sensitivity to variation among facial expressions, thereby enhancing recognition ability. We measured adaptive coding strength with an established facial expression aftereffect task and measured facial expression recognition ability with 3 tasks optimized for the assessment of individual differences. As expected, expression recognition ability was positively associated with the strength of facial expression aftereffects. We also asked whether individual variation in affective factors might contribute to expression recognition ability, given that clinical levels of such traits have previously been linked to ability. Expression recognition ability was negatively associated with self-reported anxiety but not with depression, mood, or degree of autism-like or empathetic traits. Finally, we showed that the perceptual factor of adaptive coding contributes to variation in expression recognition ability independently of affective factors.This research was supported by the Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence for Cognition and its Disorders (CE110001021), http://www.ccd.edu.au, an ARC Discovery Project grant to Elinor McKone and Romina Palermo (DP110100850), and an ARC Discovery Outstanding Researcher Award to Gillian Rhodes (DP130102300)