Undergraduate Research Day 2020
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/20158
With students involved in so many research opportunities, Undergraduate Research Day provides the perfect opportunity for them to share their work with the campus community. Held each April, Undergraduate Research Day showcases current research, scholarship, and artistic endeavors.
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Item Maternal Anxiety, Temperament & Brain Morphometry in Infancy(2020) Margolis, Emma; Filippi, Courtney; Ravi, Sanjana; Bracy, Maya; Pine, Daniel; Fox, Nathan; Filippi, Courtney; Fox, NathanMaternal factors (e.g., maternal anxiety) and infant temperament (e.g., distress to novelty) shape children’s social-emotional development. However, we know relatively little about the impact these factors have on infant brain development. This study investigates associations between maternal anxiety, distress to novelty (i.e., negative reactivity) and brain morphometry at 4-months. At 4-months, infants’ temperament was assessed by identifying distress in response to novel stimuli. Mothers completed the Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI) to measure maternal anxiety. Within 2-weeks, high-resolution structural MRI data were acquired during infants’ natural sleep. MRI data were processed using the iBEAT (Dai et al, 2013) pipeline to obtain subcortical and cortical volume estimates. Regression analyses were conducted to investigate whether infant temperament moderated the relation between maternal anxiety and brain volume at a priori selected regions of interest, controlling for total intracranial volume. Results indicate that there was no significant interaction or main effect of temperament. However, there was a main effect of maternal anxiety in all ROIs tested. Greater maternal anxiety predicted larger hippocampus (β=.417,p<.036), amygdala (β=.429,p<.031), superior frontal gyrus (β=.410,p<.041), middle frontal gyrus (β=.411,p<.039), inferior frontal gyrus (β=.404,p<.039), dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (β=.416,p<.039) and posterior cingulate cortex (β=.407,p<.042). This study provides novel evidence that increased maternal anxiety is linked to differences in child-brain morphometry.Item MRI Processing Pipeline Variability and Infant Brain Morphometry Associations to 4-Month Infant Temperament(2020) Foster, Kayla; Filippi, Courtney; Margolis, Emma; Ravi, Sanjana; Bracy, Maya; Pine, Daniel; Fox, Nathan; Fox, Nathan; Filippi, CourtneyNegative reactive temperament, an infant temperament characterized by fear of novelty, is associated with adolescent amygdala volume (Filippi et al, 2020) and adult prefrontal cortex (PFC) thickness (Schwartz et al, 2010). However, it remains unknown whether these differences in brain morphometry emerge in infancy. Further, evaluating this possibility is a challenge because few pipelines are optimized for processing infant magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data. Thus, evaluation of available infant MRI processing pipelines is necessary prior to examining associations between negative reactivity and brain morphometry. This study examines (1) which MRI pipeline performs best for 4-month-old infant MRI data and (2) associations between temperament and brain morphometry. Behavioral reactivity was assessed by presenting novel stimuli to infants. High-resolution structural MRI data was acquired a few weeks later. MRI data were processed using the iBEAT (Dai et al, 2013), dHCP (Makropoulos et al, 2018), and CIVET (Ad-Dab’bagh et al., 2006) pipelines to obtain estimates of amygdala and PFC volume. The quality of segmentations of the three pipelines was then assessed. The processing pipelines showed differences in terms of quality of gray/white segmentation and percentage of processing failures. Overall, iBEAT performed the best with the highest percent of useable data. Using the iBEAT output, we examined the associations between infant brain morphometry and reactivity. Results indicated no significant association between amygdala or PFC volume and reactivity.