An important issue in addressing the cocaine addiction problem is the tendency and probability of recovering addicts to relapse to cocaine after a significant period of time not-using. External cues that have been conditioned to be associated with cocaine use in the past are powerful triggers that cause relapse to cocaine-seeking behaviors. Drug relapse is often caused by experiencing “craving,” a subjective affective state that motivates one to seek drugs. Cocaine craving increasing as a function of time has been shown in the laboratory setting in rats and subsequently dubbed as the “incubation of cocaine craving.” This phenomenon shows that craving increases as a function of time in response to these conditioned cues. Although both women and men have a path to addiction with cocaine, women experience a faster transition from casual use to drug addiction, have a harder time remaining drug-free, and display a greater probability of relapse compared to men. Pre-clinical studies showed that female rats demonstrate an enhanced incubation response when re-exposed to conditioned cocaine cues and display conditioned place preference at lower doses of cocaine than male rats. However, the brain regions that underlie the enhanced incubation response are unknown. We trained cycling female and male rats in the laboratory to self-administer cocaine on a continuous long-access (6h), fixed-ratio 1 reinforcement schedule (reinforcement administered after one correct response) for 10-14 days. After self-administration training, rats were exposed to the cocaine self-administration environment on abstinence days 1 and 35. Our aim for this experiment is to investigate the brain regions that underlie incubation. We are quantifying the immediate early gene c-Fos immunoreactivity in cells across various brain regions in order to determine the similarities and differences in the neural activation during incubation of cocaine craving in female and male rats. We expect to see increased c-Fos expression in animals that are incubuating craving.

Alcohol use disorder (AUD) is associated with severe alcohol-related harm, especially in vulnerable populations. People experiencing homelessness comprise one such population that is disproportionately affected by AUD and its sequelae. Although traditional abstinence-based treatment does not adequately reach or engage this population, a growing body of research has indicated that harm-reduction treatment may present an efficacious alternative. Harm-reduction treatment uses a compassionate and pragmatic approach to help people who use substances and their communities reduce substance-related harm and improve quality of life without requiring abstinence or even use reduction. Primary components of harm-reduction treatment for AUD can include medication-assisted treatment alongside counseling, in which interventionists assess and track harm-reduction metrics, help patients set harm-reduction goals, and discuss safer-use strategies. Studies that have implemented safer-use strategies, or means of staying safer and healthier even if patients are drinking, have shown efficacy in reducing alcohol-related harm. However, no studies to date have explored the associations between implementation of safer-use strategies and alcohol-related harm in people experiencing homelessness and AUD. This secondary study (N=213) was conducted in the context of a larger randomized controlled trial (N=308) of harm-reduction pharmacological and behavioral treatments with people experiencing homelessness and AUD. We aim to quantitatively and qualitatively describe treated patients’ engagement with safer-use strategies over the three-month treatment course and examine the longitudinal association between safer-use strategies and alcohol-related harm. We expect to see inverse associations between the application of safer-use strategies and alcohol-related harm. These findings may help clinicians and counselors better understand what kinds of safer-use strategies are most commonly endorsed by this population and their relative contribution to the reductions in alcohol-related harm and improvements in quality of life observed in the context of harm-reduction treatment with people experiencing homelessness and AUD.

Foveal vision processes fine details while peripheral vision gathers broad information. Our study investigates how foveal stimuli paired with peripheral stimuli impacts concept processing. We hypothesized that semantically related peripheral information facilitates one’s processing of foveally-presented information. Participants identified backward-masked words while being exposed to peripheral imagery that was either congruent (related) or incongruent (unrelated) to the words, or exposed to no peripheral images. We predicted that congruent images would facilitate greater recognition accuracy of foveally-presented words compared to incongruent images or no images. Participants had higher accuracy in the congruent condition, followed by the no images and incongruent conditions. This supports our hypothesis that peripheral imagery impacts accuracy recognition of masked words and that theoretically, peripheral stimuli facilitate recognition of related foveally-presented stimuli.

Mental health and wellbeing of undergraduates in STEM is an important and pressing issue in college that needs to be addressed both culturally and institutionally. The UW College of Engineering (COE) is a high-stress environment, facilitated in part by the college’s competitive admission process, making it an interesting case study to look at this question. The purpose of this research project is to understand the characteristics of mental health of undergraduates in the COE and determine if there is a noticeable difference between mental health before and after studying engineering. I hypothesize that is an overall poor quality in mental health outcomes across all groups. The study utilizes a mixed-method design, incorporating a survey and qualitative data. Survey results recorded numerical data and free response questions to assess mental health. The data was analyzed and broken down for further analysis by gender, race, etc. Preliminary results suggest disparities between groups based on social characteristics. This research is important because it will help inform the further study of mental health in engineering environments and provide direction for the COE to address these issues.

A recent neuroimaging study suggests that early blind (EB) individuals have enhanced auditory frequency selectivity within auditory areas in the brain. Some previous studies have found that early blind (EB) individuals have enhanced pitch discrimination abilities compared to sighted controls but these results were not been replicated in later studies. Here, we measured performance in two types of auditory frequency task: one designed to tap into early stages of processing near the cochlea (notch task) and the other thought to reflect early stages of cortical processing (pitch task), within the same EB and SC individuals. The two groups were carefully matched in their age and musical training, since musicians have enhanced pitch perception. In the notch task, participants detected the presence of a target tone (1200 Hz) among simultaneously presented two filtered noise bands. We manipulated the notch width (i.e., the frequency separation between the two noise bands) to probe frequency selectivity. In the pitch task, participants judged whether two tones (500-1200 Hz), presented consecutively, were rising or falling in pitch. For each task they completed three blocks to see the effects of learning. Preliminary results show that, overall, there was no difference between EB and SC for either of the tasks. In the pitch task, both of the groups became better in pitch discrimination with more blocks, but there was no significant difference between EB and SC individuals. The results suggest that the neural differences found in auditory cortex of EB individuals may reflect more complex auditory processes then those that underlie either the notch or the pitch task.

For many years, the primary mode of treatment for people experiencing alcohol use disorder (AUD) has been abstinence-based treatment. Research has indicated, however, that abstinence-based treatment does not optimally engage or treat more severely affected populations, such as people experiencing AUD and homelessness. Instead, harm-reduction treatment approaches are more desirable for this population and can serve as an effective treatment alternative for people experiencing AUD and homelessness. Harm-reduction treatment entails a set of compassionate and pragmatic strategies to emphasize client autonomy, mitigate substance-related harm, and promote quality of life (QoL) without the need for abstinence or use-reduction. Specific components include assessment and tracking of harm-reduction metrics, harm-reduction goal-setting, and implementation of safer-use strategies. This secondary study (N = 213) served to qualitatively and quantitatively explore harm-reduction goals generated by participants in a larger, 4-arm randomized control trial of harm-reduction treatment for people experiencing homelessness and AUD. The three treatment groups included in this secondary study received: a) harm-reduction counseling only, b) harm-reduction counseling + medication assisted treatment (i.e., extended-release naltrexone), and c) harm-reduction counseling + placebo. Participant goals were recorded using the Safer Drinking and Harm Reduction Efforts (SHaRE) scale at baseline assessments and weeks 4, 8, and 12. Qualitative analyses will be conducted to determine the kinds of goals participants generated throughout the 12-week treatment period. Additional descriptive, quantitative analyses will establish quantity of participant goals set at each time point. Finally, inferential statistics will be used to test harm-reduction goals as correlates of alcohol outcomes across the 12-week treatment period. It is expected that a) the combined pharmacotherapy group will generate, progress toward, and achieve more goals than other study conditions; and b) quality-of-life goals will be more strongly associated with reduced alcohol-related harm than drinking-related goals.

Systematic underrepresentation and the predominance of cisgender male voices in STEM fields put women and queer students at disproportionate risk and in need of support. Addressing these communities and redesigning access to resources is vital to their continued growth and development. This project aims to address the mental health of undergraduate students and the resources available at the UW’s Human-Centered Design and Engineering (HCDE) department. The project utilizes a mixed-method survey and interview protocol to understand students’ experience with their mental health in HCDE and their awareness of available resources. With this data, I will analyze trends amongst students to identify disparities and key issues for students and then create a speculative design for how the HCDE department can better support their students. Speculative design is a framework for redesigning thought patterns and systems. I am currently in the data-collection phase and have released the survey. Based on first-hand observations and literature review, I expect to see disproportionately poor mental health outcomes in queer and women students. I also expect that a majority of participants are unaware of the existence/extent of many of UW’s current resources. Diversity is vital to a department’s success, especially because HCDE prides itself on its inclusivity. This research will illuminate how certain groups of students are supported more than others. These voices are often not recorded and demographic details not asked for beyond age and sex, meaning researchers cannot directly address specific populations that are historically underrepresented and create a working framework to better support them.

The network model of memory proposes that concepts are linked together in the mind. When a concept is activated in the mind (e.g., “ocean”), this activation spreads to semantically, or meaning, related concepts (e.g., “boat”), making them easier to recognize. Expanding on this model, the present study investigated whether concepts presented without conscious awareness could still facilitate faster recognition of semantically related stimuli. Participants first completed a rating task, where they rated how much they liked a word, and then completed a lexical decision task, where they decided if a string of letters was a real word or not. In both tasks, some words were related to the concept “school”. Thus, the goal of the rating task was to implicitly prime, or unconsciously activate, the concept and make recognition of “school”-related words in the lexical decision task easier. Participants were not informed of the relationship between the tasks. We found that implicitly primed words (words related to the concept “school”) had faster reaction times and higher accuracy in the lexical decision task than words that were not primed (not related to the concept “school”). Our results expand on the network model, providing evidence that priming can elicit easier word recognition even when a participant lacks conscious awareness of the priming and when there is a time delay between the prime and target. This provides a potential mechanism for how our behavior is affected by the stimuli we encounter in everyday life, without us knowing it.