Engaging users is essential for designers of any exhibit, such as the human-computer interface, the visual effects, or the informational content. The need to understand users’ experiences and learning gains has motivated a focus on user engagement across computer science. However, there has been limited review of how human-computer interaction research interprets and employs the concepts in museum and exhibit settings, specifically their joint effects. The purpose of this study is to assess users’ experience and learning outcome, while interacting with a web application part of an exhibit that showcases the NASA Psyche spacecraft model. This web application provides an interactive menu that allows the user to navigate on the touch panel installed within the Psyche Spacecraft Exhibit. The user can press the button on the menu which will light up the corresponding parts of the model with a detailed description displayed on the panel. For this study, participants were required to take a questionnaire, a pretest, and a posttest. They were also required to interact with the web application while wearing an Emotiv EPOC+ EEG headset that measures their emotions while they were visiting the exhibit. During the study, data such as questionnaire results, sensed emotions from the EEG headset, and pretest and posttest scores were collected. Using the information gathered, the study explores user experience and learning gains through both biometrics and traditional tools. The findings show that users felt engaged and frustrated the most and that users gained more knowledge but at varying degrees from the interaction. Future work can be done to lower the levels of frustration and keep learning gains at a more consistent rate by improving the exhibit design to better meet various learning needs and visitor profiles.

Recent studies indicate that words containing /ӕ/ and /u/ vowel phonemes can be mapped onto the emotional dimension of arousal. Specifically, the wham-womb effect describes the inclination to associate words with /ӕ/ vowel-sounds (as in “wham”) with high-arousal emotions and words with /u/ vowel-sounds (as in “womb”) with low-arousal emotions. The objective of this study was to replicate the wham-womb effect using nonsense pseudowords and to test if findings extend with use of a novel methodology that includes verbal auditory and visual pictorial stimuli, which can eventually be used to test young children. We collected data from 99 undergraduate participants through an online survey. Participants heard pre-recorded pairs of monosyllabic pseudowords containing /ӕ/ or /u/ vowel phonemes and then matched individual pseudowords to illustrations portraying high or low arousal emotions. Two t-tests were conducted to analyze the size of the wham-womb effect across pseudowords and across participants, specifically the likelihood that /ӕ/ sounds are paired with high arousal images and /u/ sounds with low arousal images. Our findings robustly confirmed the wham-womb effect. Participants paired /ӕ/ words with high arousal emotion pictures and /u/ words with low arousal ones at a 73.2% rate with a large effect size. The wham-womb effect supports the idea that verbal acoustic signals tend to be tied to embodied facial musculature that is related to human emotions, which supports the adaptive value of sound symbolism in language evolution and development.

For my thesis, I conducted a study on a healthy pediatric cohort to investigate how DNA methylation of genes related to myelin may predict total white matter volume in a healthy pediatric cohort. The relatively new field of neuroimaging epigenetics investigates how methylation of genes in peripheral tissue samples is related to certain structural or functional features of the brain, as measured by neuroimaging data. Research has already demonstrated that methylation of genes in peripheral tissues is related to a variety of brain disorders. We hypothesized that methylation of myelin-related genes as measured in saliva samples would predict total white matter volume in a healthy pediatric cohort. After processing DNA methylation data from saliva samples from participants, multiple linear regressions were ran to determine if DNA methylation of myelin related genes was related to total white matter volume, as measured by data from structural MRIs. Results showed that these genes, which included MOG, MBP, and MYRF, significantly predicted total white matter volume. Two genes that were significant in our results have been previously shown to produce proteins that are essential to the structure of myelin.

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is an irreversible brain disorder that plagues millions of people with no current cure. Current clinical research is slowly advancing to more definitive treatments in hopes of reducing the effects of progressive cognitive and behavioral decline, but none so far can slow AD’s onset. A brain area known as the nucleus incertus (NI) was recently discovered to potentially impact AD because of its connections to brain targets that degenerate; however, the NI’s role is unknown. This goal of this experiment was to use a transgenic mouse model (APP/PS1) that expresses AD pathology slowly as found in humans, and to test the mice in a variety of cognitive and anxiety assessments. Mice of both sexes and two different ages were used, with the first being young adult before AD pathology manifests (around 3-4 months old), and the second being around the cusp of when AD pathology manifests (late adult, 8-10 months old). The mice were tested in a variety of cognitive tasks that included the novel object recognition (NOR), Morris water maze (MWM), and the object placement (OP), with the latter being the focus of my thesis. Anxiety measures were taken from the open field (OF) and elevated plus maze (EPM) with the visible platform (VP) used to ensure mice could perform on the rigorous MWM task. In the OP, we found an age effect, where the older mice were less likely to explore the moved object during the OP compared to the younger mice; motor ability was unlikely to explain this effect. We did not find any significant age by genotype effects. These findings indicate that cognitive impairment only just started to affect the older cohort, since OP impairment was found on one measure and not another. Other measures currently being quantified will be helpful in understanding this data, and to see whether learning, memory, and anxiety are affected.