Proteins, the basic structural and functional building blocks of cellular machinery, evolve under significant constraint. Evolutionary pressures limit the acceptable variation and covariation of amino acids in a protein. As such, these evolutionary...
Alzheimer's Disease (AD) is a devastating neurodegenerative disease its pathogenesis is linked with cholesterol metabolism. Acyl-CoA:cholesterol acyltransferases (ACATs) are key enzymes involved in cholesterol homeostasis that catalyze the...
The neurophysiological examination of auditory-object representations has focused on how early auditory cortical areas code for the spectral and temporal features of auditory objects. The goals of this dissertation was to investigate how auditory...
How is concrete conceptual information represented in the brain? Little is known about the neural organization for details of concrete objects when presented as words. The goal of the first two studies was to investigate this. In the third study,...
The experiments comprising this thesis aimed to characterize the neural and behavioral correlates of learning about and responding to the predictive information conveyed by social cues. Facial expressions are cues that convey critical information...
Evolutionary Computation (EC) is one of the most advanced computational techniques. It has been frequently and successfully used to find good solutions to many complicated optimization problems with limited computational resources. EC is the...
Health status indicators -- Measurement. Health surveys -- Methodology. Medical economics. Spine -- Diseases.
Several ""health state classification systems"" are available to estimate health state values (HSV) for economic evaluation. Evidence of variation in estimates from different systems raises concern that system choice may affect study conclusions...
Corpus callosum -- Physiology. Cerebral hemispheres. Laterality. Sensorimotor integration. Brain -- Localization of functions.
The overarching goal of the dissertation was to further understanding of the relationship between callosal organization, functional lateralization, and interhemispheric communication in the healthy, young adult brain. Three converging methodologies...
Social perception -- Physiological aspects. ; Prefrontal cortex -- Physiology.
From the most minimal of person information, such as a photograph or a sentence, people are able to rapidly infer a multitude of complex personality traits. These social inferences are thought to rely upon cognitive representations of person...
Recent studies demonstrating that eye position modulates auditory responses in a brainstem auditory structure and in primary auditory cortex (Groh et al., 2001; Werner-Reiss et al., 2003a), suggest preparation of the auditory signal for eventual...
Behavior during interracial contact is sometimes positive but often negative. Previous work has examined individual differences, such as racial attitudes and motivations to respond without prejudice, as predictors of behavior during interracial...