Previous literature has identified the relationship between the incidence of concussion and sports played. Further delineations occur between collision versus non-collision sports, contact versus non-contact sports, and athlete gender. We aimed to examine the relationship between incidence of concussion and sport played, and if incidence correlated with increased level of contact or with differences in gender. We undertook this study to better understand why there may be a rise in concussion incidence, especially in non-contact sports and any differences in concussion incidence in sex comparable sports. The cross-sectional study design uses a large data set collected on collegiate athletic teams at universities within the PAC-12 Conference between 2016 and 2022. Each concussion was diagnosed based on the clinical assessment of the evaluating sports medicine physician. The uniqueness of this data is due to diversity in population, broad location of subjects, and sport. I will analyze concussion incidence data from all PAC-12 athletes using descriptive statistics to describe the population and incidence rates to measure differences across the various groups. We believe that our findings will show women’s sports have a higher rate of concussion than men’s. Athletes participating in collision sports such as football may not necessarily be more likely to sustain a concussion than those who play limited or non-contact sports. There has been an increase in reporting, although it is unclear whether the rise is due to an increase in reporting, actual incidence, or a little of both. The information from this study will be useful in determining where additional concussion education and prevention measures should be directed. 

Visual perspective-taking (PT) is a fundamental spatial cognition task, requiring an individual to adopt another’s viewpoint. Previous experiments have shown that response times increase as the angular difference between viewer and reference perspectives grows. Preliminary fMRI results suggest that neural activity in specific brain regions follows a similar pattern, their activity increases as a factor of angular difference, reflecting the cognitive demands of mental perspective transformation. However, little is known about how eye-gaze behavior varies in this task. In this study, we analyze eye-tracking data collected during fMRI scans with an Eyelink 1000 to examine the relationship between gaze patterns and perspective alignment. Specifically, we investigate whether eye-gaze behavior differs between aligned and unaligned trials and whether angular difference influences gaze dynamics. Gaze coordinates (xpos, ypos) will be analyzed trial-by-trial to determine how visual attention is modulated during perspective-taking. Understanding these gaze patterns may provide insights into the strategies used in spatial perspective shifts and their neural underpinnings.

Visual Perspective-taking (VPT) is the ability to recognize another’s viewpoint, and can play a role in communication and empathy. Previous research supports that VPT in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) populations is altered compared to neurotypicals (NT), but the traits within both populations that contribute to VPT differences remain unknown. This study investigates how VPT differs in ASD compared to NT adults using both animate and inanimate target objects. We also explore how these differences might be associated with ASD traits, measured by the Social Responsiveness Scale-2 (SRS-2). Participants complete computerized tasks that evaluate how stimuli appear from a different perspective. Psychophysical tests determine participants' ability to identify the position of an object from the perspective of an animate object (an avatar in the image) and an inanimate object (a chair), measuring accuracy and reaction time. We expect to replicate past findings of increased reaction time with greater angular disparity between the participants’ viewpoint and the viewpoint of the target object, for both ASD and NT subjects. We hypothesize this interaction between reaction time and angular perspective for both populations may interact with the type of reference object (animate vs. inanimate) and SRS-2 scores. We believe that NT participants will demonstrate greater accuracy and faster reaction times than ASD participants in both animate and inanimate conditions, with the difference being evident in the animate condition for ASD participants, possibly due to challenges in processing social cues reflected by higher scores on the SRS-2. This research can increase the understanding of the psychological disparities in individuals with ASD compared to NT contributing to diagnostic tools and targeted interventions for improving social cognition in ASD populations and potentially other neurodivergent populations with VPT differences.