Participation in a Yoga Study Decreases Stress and Depression Scores for Incarcerated Women.

Incarcerated individuals exhibit a high incidence of stress-related disorders, including addiction and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), as well as the added stress of captivity. Access to stress-reduction tools is limited for these individuals. One possible approach may be regular structured yoga classes. Using two approaches, we tested the effectiveness of a brief, intensive yoga intervention in a population of incarcerated women in a county jail. The first approach was an examination of archival data collected as part of a program analysis. Individuals showed considerable reduction in self-reported stress following a single yoga session. The second approach was an experimental study using a week-long yoga intervention. Thirty-four participants were assigned to either the yoga or control group for the first week. In the second week, the conditions were reversed. Participants were assessed weekly, before and after intervention. Baseline scores revealed high rates of depression, stress, and exposure to traumatic life events compared to normative data. Stress and depression were assessed using the Perceived Stress Scale and Beck Depression Inventory, respectively. Compared to controls, participants reported less depression after a week of daily yoga sessions. Perceived stress declined under both control and yoga conditions. Due to the transient nature of the jail institution, it is important to examine interventions that can be provided on a short-term basis. Although there were limitations in this study, the results support the conclusion that the brief yoga intervention had a positive effect on participants' well-being.

Students apply research methods to consumer decisions about cognitive enhancing drinks.

The goal of this class project was to provide students with a hands-on research experience that allowed autonomy, but eliminated duplication of effort and could be completed within one semester. Our resources were limited to a small supply budget and an introductory psychology subject pool. Six students from a behavioral neuroscience class tested claims made by a drink company that their product improves cognitive function. The students each chose a cognitive task for their part of the project. The tasks included the Donders Reaction Time Task, the Stroop Task, the Raven's Progressive Matrices, a short-term memory span test, the Rey-Osterrieth Complex Figure Test and a simple measure of prefrontal EEG activity. Participants were randomly assigned to an experimental or control drink. The experimental group received the putative cognitive enhancing drink and the control group received a placebo drink that was very similar in color and taste. The two drinks shared no active ingredients. Results suggest that the putative cognitive enhancing drink did not improve performance on any of the tasks and decreased performance on the short-term memory task. These findings are discussed in regard to implications for consumers as well as further research into supplements and their ability to improve cognitive performance. Each student presented his/her results at a university-wide research conference. This project provided a rich experience in which students had the opportunity to carry out a research project from conception to presentation.

Differential effects of experience on tuning properties of macaque MTL neurons in a passive viewing task.

The structures of the medial temporal lobe (MTL) have been shown to be causally involved in episodic and recognition memory. However, recent work in a number of species has demonstrated that impairments in recognition memory seen following lesions of the perirhinal cortex (PRh) can be accounted for by deficits in perceptual discrimination. These findings suggest that object representation, rather than explicit recognition memory signals, may be crucial to the mnemonic process. Given the large amount of visual information encountered by primates, there must be a reconsideration of the mechanisms by which the brain efficiently stores visually presented information. Previous neurophysiological recordings from MTL structures in primates have largely focused on tasks that implicitly define object familiarity (i.e., novel vs. familiar) or contain significant mnemonic demands (e.g., conditional associations between two stimuli), limiting their utility in understanding the mechanisms underlying visual object recognition and information storage. To clarify how different regions in the MTL may contribute to visual recognition, we recorded from three rhesus macaques performing a passive viewing task. The task design systematically varies the relative familiarity of different stimuli enabling an examination of how neural activity changes as a function of experience. The data collected during this passive viewing task revealed that neurons in the MTL are generally not sensitive to the relative familiarity of a stimulus. In addition, when the specificity (i.e., which images a neuron was selective for) of individual neurons was analyzed, there was a significant dissociation between different medial temporal regions, with only neurons in TF, but not CA3 or the PRh, altering their activity as stimuli became familiar. The implications of these findings are discussed in the context of how MTL structures process information during a passive viewing paradigm.

Aging in rhesus macaques is associated with changes in novelty preference and altered saccade dynamics.

Studies demonstrating recognition deficits with aging often use tasks in which subjects have an incentive to correctly encode or retrieve the experimental stimuli. In contrast to these tasks, which may engage strategic encoding and retrieval processes, the visual paired comparison (VPC) task measures spontaneous eye movements made toward a novel as compared with familiar stimulus. In the present study, seven rhesus macaques aged 6 to 30 years exhibited a dramatic age-dependent decline in preference for a novel image compared with one presented seconds earlier. The age effect could not be accounted for by memory deficits alone, because it was present even when familiarization preceded test by 1 second. It also could not be explained by an encoding deficit, because the effect persisted with increased familiarity of the sample stimulus. Reduced novelty preference did correlate with eye movement variables, including reaction time distributions and saccade frequency. At long delay intervals (24 or 48 hours) aging was paradoxically associated with increased novelty preference. Several explanations for the age effect are considered, including the possible role of dopamine.

How do rhesus monkeys ( Macaca mulatta) scan faces in a visual paired comparison task?

When novel and familiar faces are viewed simultaneously, humans and monkeys show a preference for looking at the novel face. The facial features attended to in familiar and novel faces, were determined by analyzing the visual exploration patterns, or scanpaths, of four monkeys performing a visual paired comparison task. In this task, the viewer was first familiarized with an image and then it was presented simultaneously with a novel and the familiar image. A looking preference for the novel image indicated that the viewer recognized the familiar image and hence differentiates between the familiar and the novel images. Scanpaths and relative looking preference were compared for four types of images: (1) familiar and novel objects, (2) familiar and novel monkey faces with neutral expressions, (3) familiar and novel inverted monkey faces, and (4) faces from the same monkey with different facial expressions. Looking time was significantly longer for the novel face, whether it was neutral, expressing an emotion, or inverted. Monkeys did not show a preference, or an aversion, for looking at aggressive or affiliative facial expressions. The analysis of scanpaths indicated that the eyes were the most explored facial feature in all faces. When faces expressed emotions such as a fear grimace, then monkeys scanned features of the face, which contributed to the uniqueness of the expression. Inverted facial images were scanned similarly to upright images. Precise measurement of eye movements during the visual paired comparison task, allowed a novel and more quantitative assessment of the perceptual processes involved the spontaneous visual exploration of faces and facial expressions. These studies indicate that non-human primates carry out the visual analysis of complex images such as faces in a characteristic and quantifiable manner.