Development and evaluation of silent reading exercises for grade one,

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston Universit

Deaf ACCESS: Adapting Consent through Community Engagement and State-of-the-Art Simulation [English and Spanish versions]

A Spanish translation of this publication is available to download under Additional Files. All human subjects’ research involves an informed consent process, during which potential participants learn about research procedures, possible risks of being in the research study, and then decide if they would like to participate in the study. This information is usually communicated in written or spoken English, rather than translated into ASL, making the process inaccessible to the Deaf community. In addition, the Deaf community often feels mistrust toward researchers and strong resistance to enrolling in research studies because of the long history of mistreatment of Deaf people in the research world.2-4 Researchers must develop ways to improve access and build trust with the Deaf community to include this underserved and at-risk population in human subjects’ research studies. In 2016, the University of Massachusetts Medical School (UMMS), in partnership with Brown University, was awarded a 2-year grant from the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) to improve Deaf people’s trust and involvement in biomedical research. The Deaf ACCESS: Adapting Consent through Community Engagement and State-of-the-art Simulation research team is led by Melissa Anderson from UMMS and Co-Investigator Timothy Riker from Brown University

Probing perceptual decisions in rodents

The study of perceptual decision-making offers insight into how the brain uses complex, sometimes ambiguous information to guide actions. Understanding the underlying processes and their neural bases requires that one pair recordings and manipulations of neural activity with rigorous psychophysics. Though this research has been traditionally performed in primates, it seems increasingly promising to pursue it at least partly in mice and rats. However, rigorous psychophysical methods are not yet as developed for these rodents as they are for primates. Here we give a brief overview of the sensory capabilities of rodents and of their cortical areas devoted to sensation and decision. We then review methods of psychophysics, focusing on the technical issues that arise in their implementation in rodents. These methods represent a rich set of challenges and opportunities