Spinal Cord Injury (SCI) can often result in loss of motor, sensory and autonomic function. The current standard of care is patient-specific physical therapy (PT) interventions to allow existing neural pathways to provide some compensation. Transcutaneous electrical stimulation is a new technique where electrodes placed on the skin over the spinal cord send electrical pulses to nerves in or near the spinal cord. Transcutaneous stimulation can be combined with PT to improve arm or leg function. Does the timing or combination of these two interventions affect the recovery of the participants? Four participants in this study have an incomplete C2-C7 spinal cord injury, their injury occurred at least one year before the study, resulting upper extremity dysfunction. Baseline measurements are conducted over four weeks. Intervention consisted of six weeks of PT alone and six weeks of stimulation combined with PT, in a randomized order, followed by a twelve-week follow-up. Preliminary results indicate that improved upper extremity motor function and sensation were superior with PT combined with transcutaneous stimulation. These gains in function and sensation persist throughout the follow-up period without further stimulation. Transcutaneous spinal cord stimulation paired with PT could become the new standard of care for improving outcomes in people spinal cord injury for more than one year. In addition, future research may see greater benefits if the intervention can begin less than a year after injury, when the spinal cord may have a greater capacity for recovery.

The first innate behavior expressed by embryonic C. elegans is a dorsal-ventral head oscillation governed by a group of six glutamatergic IL1 neurons. These neurons are mechanosensitive and synapse with head muscle cells, but precisely how they regulate this behavior isn’t known. To determine whether the neurons are muscle-excitatory or inhibitory, Genetically Encoded Calcium Indicators can be used to see if neural activity corresponds to behavior. GCaMP is a group of these indicators and has multiple generations and variants for a range of calcium affinities and thus sensitivities and dynamics. We are interested in determining which version of these GCaMP proteins is optimal for the imaging of neuromuscular junctions in C. elegans embryos. To compare the relative intensities between different GCaMP we created separate constructs containing the following: a GCaMP; a muscle-specific promoter unc-120; and a calcium-independent fluorescent protein, to act as a counterstain. We have generated two strains with GCaMP7s via microinjection, along with our previously established GCaMP6f strain. Preliminary imaging has demonstrated that analysis is possible, but currently expression of the construct isn't consistent between worms or cells. Integration of the construct into the genome is currently underway to produce worms that consistently express the fluorescent proteins in all muscle cells. Further imaging and analysis will follow. Determining the appropriate reagent will allow us to better understand the emergence of behavior.

Aging can be measured by a progressive decline in mitochondrial function which causes the slowing of cellular metabolism which influences mobility and locomotion. Behavioral and genetic experiments have focused on genetic pathways by which cellular oxidation affects how an organism moves and thus how it ages. Recent studies have that there is a critical window during development when mitochondrial stress can exert beneficial effects. This has led to the concept of mitohormesis, a term used to define the activation of an adaptive stress response that results in a beneficial effect on health and lifespan. To better understand the connection between cellular stress, physiological changes, and aging, locomotion and reproduction assays will be utilized in a small transparent nematode named Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans), which has genome counterparts to some human genes. The impact of stress on C. Elegans will be observed by depriving them of food and exposing them to drastic changes in temperature, to observe and quantify what stress placed upon an organism does to their locomotion and reproduction patterns. We expect these stressful changes to the environment to cause a decrease in locomotion speeds, and a reduction in reproduction rates, this study should provide us with additional information on aging in a model than can help us understand the influence or cellular stress on an organism.

In recent years there has been a growing body of literature which seeks to employ network science as a means to describe various cognitive phenomena. One such approach involves implementing semantic networks as a measure for creativity (Beaty & Johnson, 2021; Siew, Wulff, Beckage, & Kenett, 2019), which despite being historically difficult to effectively operationalize due its complex and multidimensional nature (Beaty & Johnson, 2021), has nevertheless been a salient focus of cognition researchers due to the high social value placed on creative output. One of the factors which has emergently been shown to correlate positively with creativity is rumination, which can be characterized by persistent, negative, and repetitive thinking about one’s self or experiences (Nolen-Hoeksema, Wisco, & Lyubomirsky, 2008), and which has been associated with the presence and exacerbation of psychopathologies like depression (Watkins & Roberts, 2020). Despite its negative reputation, extant literature seems broadly to corroborate this positive association (Verhaeghen, Joormann, & Aikman, 2014; Wang, Zhao, Yuan, & Shi, 2021). However, there appears to be an absence of literature examining this link through a network-theoretic lens, an approach which could help strengthen the empiric link between rumination and creativity, in addition to further clarifying semantic distance as a robust operational surrogate for the latter. This presentation seeks to summarize research conducted to better establish the aforementioned link by answering the following question: Is there a statistically significant, positive correlation between mean semantic distance and trait rumination in a task of chained free-association?