xiii, 75 p. : ill. (some col.) / Uplift rates associated with 12 episodic tremor and slip events on the Cascadia Subduction Zone occurring between 1997 and 2010 have been determined from hourly water level records from 4 NOAA tide gauges (Neah Bay, Port Angeles, Port Townsend, and Seattle). Displacements inferred from water levels generally agree with displacements inferred from modeling GPS data. Examination of uplift between events shows an inter-event deformation rate approximately equal in magnitude, with ETS events, on average, releasing strain accumulated between events, suggesting that ETS is consistent with the elastic rebound theory. Additionally, while the GPS record only extends to the late 1990s and the tremor record includes only recent decades for Cascadia, tidal records in the Pacific Northwest and around the world span many decades. Thus, by showing that ETS can be resolved in tidal records we open up the possibility that tidal records could be used to study ETS where other tools are not available. This thesis contains unpublished coauthored material. / Committee in charge: Dr. David A. Schmidt, Chair; Dr. Ray J. Weldon, Advisor; Dr. Dean Livelybrooks, Member

Introdução: O aprendizado intencional/incidental pode influenciar a memória. A persistência deste efeito avaliado ao longo do tempo foi pouco estudada até o momento. Objetivos: Avaliar a persistência da memória comparando as aprendizagens intencional e incidental. Métodos: A amostra (120 sujeitos funcionalmente independentes, com idade variando de 18 a 81 anos), foi subdividida em dois grupos (experimental - condição ‘intenção de aprender’ - e controle). Uma abordagem ecológica foi utilizada para a avaliação do aprendizado incidental. As avaliações foram realizadas dois e sete dias após a codificação. Resultados: A intenção de aprender e a aquisição incidental (a partir de experiências de vida diária) melhoraram a recuperação da memória no dia dois, mas não sete dias após a codificação. Conclusão: Estes achados sugerem que o estado motivacional (espontâneo ou induzido) que modula o sistema da atenção deve ser importante para a melhora na recuperação das informações aprendidas. / Background: The intentional/incidental learning can influence memory. The persistence of this effect assessed over time has been little studied up to date. Objectives: To evaluate the persistence of memory comparing intentional and incidental learning conditions. Method: The sample (120 functionally independent subjects, age ranging from 18 to 81 years old), was subdivided into two groups (experimental - intention to learn condition - and control). An ecological approach was applied for the incidental learning condition. The assessments were performed two and seven days after the encoding. Results: The intention to learn and the incidental acquisition (from daily life experiences) improved performance two but not seven days after the encoding. Conclusions: These findings suggest that motivational state (spontaneous or induced) which module the system of attention may be important for the improvement in the retrieval of the information learned.

abstract: Adult second-language learners of Spanish struggle with the acquisition of preterite and imperfect selection due to the overtly morphological representation of grammatical aspect. Prior studies have documented the effect of a default encoding without influence of the lexical aspect in the emergence of aspectual morphology, and have proposed the Default Past Tense Hypothesis (DPTH). This study investigates the emergence of aspectual morphology by testing the DPTH and the effect of adverbials at interpreting grammatical aspect in this process of acquisition. Twenty-eight English-speaking learners of Spanish (beginning, intermediate and advanced) and twenty native-Spanish speakers are tested with two written comprehension tasks that assess the interpretation of habitual/imperfect and episodic/preterite readings of eventive verbs. The truth-value judgment task incorporates forty short stories with two summary sentences, from which participants must choose one as true. The grammaticality judgment task presents sixty-four sentences with temporal adverbials of position and duration, thirty-two are grammatical and thirty-two are ungrammatical. Participants must accept or reject them using a 5-point likert scale. The findings indicate that the DPTH is partially supported by the statistical data showing a default marker, imperfect for beginning learners, and preterite for intermediate learners. This provides support to the argument of unsteady aspectual checking of [-bounded] in the spec of AspP and not necessarily by only checking [+past] in the TP for intermediate learners. The influence of the lexical aspect value of the verb is partially evident with advanced learners. Temporal adverbials play an important role at interpreting grammatical aspect with intermediate and advanced learners. Results show that beginning learners are not influenced by the presence of adverbials due to their inexperience with the Spanish aspectual morphology. The findings also allow the confirmation of prior results about factors that influence the interpretation of preterite and imperfect. First, the instruction of aspectual morphology co-indexed with specific temporal adverbials, and second, that learners rely on lexical cues at the sentential level, while native speakers rely on discursive ones. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Applied Linguistics 2016

Introdução: O aprendizado intencional/incidental pode influenciar a memória. A persistência deste efeito avaliado ao longo do tempo foi pouco estudada até o momento. Objetivos: Avaliar a persistência da memória comparando as aprendizagens intencional e incidental. Métodos: A amostra (120 sujeitos funcionalmente independentes, com idade variando de 18 a 81 anos), foi subdividida em dois grupos (experimental - condição ‘intenção de aprender’ - e controle). Uma abordagem ecológica foi utilizada para a avaliação do aprendizado incidental. As avaliações foram realizadas dois e sete dias após a codificação. Resultados: A intenção de aprender e a aquisição incidental (a partir de experiências de vida diária) melhoraram a recuperação da memória no dia dois, mas não sete dias após a codificação. Conclusão: Estes achados sugerem que o estado motivacional (espontâneo ou induzido) que modula o sistema da atenção deve ser importante para a melhora na recuperação das informações aprendidas. / Background: The intentional/incidental learning can influence memory. The persistence of this effect assessed over time has been little studied up to date. Objectives: To evaluate the persistence of memory comparing intentional and incidental learning conditions. Method: The sample (120 functionally independent subjects, age ranging from 18 to 81 years old), was subdivided into two groups (experimental - intention to learn condition - and control). An ecological approach was applied for the incidental learning condition. The assessments were performed two and seven days after the encoding. Results: The intention to learn and the incidental acquisition (from daily life experiences) improved performance two but not seven days after the encoding. Conclusions: These findings suggest that motivational state (spontaneous or induced) which module the system of attention may be important for the improvement in the retrieval of the information learned.

O lobo temporal mesial (LTM) é essencial para tarefas de memória e possui muitas conexões com diferentes áreas do cérebro. Pacientes com epilepsia do LTM, refratários ao tratamento medicamentoso, são candidatos à cirurgia para remoção do foco das crises. Portanto, antes da cirurgia, é essencial avaliar eventuais riscos de declínio das funções de memória, por meio de uma série de testes clínicos. Recentemente, abriu-se a possibilidade de estudar certos aspectos do funcionamento cerebral, de modo não invasivo, utilizando Imagens funcionais por Ressonância Magnética (fMRI). O objetivo deste trabalho foi desenvolver métodos que possibilitem a aplicação de protocolos de memória em estudos de fMRI, com vistas a pacientes com epilepsia. Para a manutenção da atenção durante os estudos de fMRI foi confeccionado um dispositivo infravermelho para registrar as respostas obtidas. Além disso, foi desenvolvido um programa (VOI Analyser) para a otimização das análises dos exames de fMRI. Tanto o dispositivo infravermelho como o programa foram amplamente utilizados em vários projetos de pesquisa permitindo o estudo de tarefas complexas. Neste estudo, a tarefa visava identificar as redes funcionais que participam do processo de codificação e recuperação de memória episódica utilizando tarefas visuais de identificação de cenas complexas. Foram estudados nesse estudo 12 voluntários assintomáticos e 7 pacientes com epilepsia do LTM. O estudo de grupo evidenciou o envolvimento de estruturas do LTM. A tarefa demonstrou ter um nível de dificuldade alta, em especial para pacientes, baseando-se na avaliação do tempo de resposta e nível de acertos. Além do estudo dos grupos, foi realizada uma análise por região de interesse (ROI), com ênfase no complexo amídala-hipocampo. Em seguida, o foco do estudo foi voltado para a assimetria hemisférica funcional, por meio do cálculo do índice de lateralização (IL). Além de rever os resultados obtidos pelo IL convencional, resultados preliminares levaram à proposta de um segundo índice corrigido, considerando a quantidade de voxels e a assimetria das ROI. A utilização do índice corrigido tornou a análise mais estável por diminuir a dependência do limiar estatístico considerado. A seguir, foi realizada uma subdivisão do hipocampo em porção anterior, central e posterior a qual indicou uma maior participação da região posterior na tarefa de codificação e da anterior na tarefa de recuperação, tanto entre os voluntários como em pacientes. / Medial temporal lobe (MTL) is essential for memory tasks and has many connections with different areas of the brain. Patients with MTL epilepsy refractory to medical treatment are candidates for surgery to remove the epileptiform tissue. Therefore, before surgery, it is essential to assess the risk of memory function decrease caused by the procedure, through a series of clinical trials. Recently, there is the possibility of studying certain aspects of brain functioning by using a non-invasive technique: functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). The aim of this work was to implement memory protocols in fMRI studies of epilepsy patients. For attention maintenance during the fMRI study an infrared device was built, in order to record the response times. In addition, a software was developed (VOI Analyser) to optimize the analysis of the fMRI examinations. Both have been widely used in several research projects enabling the study of complex tasks. In this study, the task was intended to identify the functional networks involved in the process of encoding and retrieving of episodic memory using a visual task involving complex scenes. 19 subjects were studied: 12 controls and 7 patients with refractory epilepsy. Group study showed the involvement of structures in MTL. The task has demonstrated a high level of difficulty, especially for patients, based on the analysis of response times and correct hits. In addition to the study of groups, an individual analysis was performed by region of interest (ROI), with emphasis on amigdala-hippocampus complex. Then, functional hemispheric asymmetry was studied, by means of the lateralization index (LI). In addition to the computation of conventional LI, an alternative LI was proposed, which considers voxels occupancy and ROI asymmetry. The use of such modified index tuned the analysis more stable by decreasing the dependence on considered statistical threshold. Moreover, LI was also computed on 3 portions of the hippocampus: anterior, middle and posterior. The results indicated a greater involvement of the posterior portion on the encoding task and anterior one in the recovery task, both for volunteers and patients.

There is a body of research on the effect of physical activity oncognition in the old adult population. Less research areconducted on adolescents. The aim for this study is to find out ifadolescents long-term memory is affected by physical activity.144 pupils were asked to rate their physical activity each week.Thereafter their long- term memory was tested through tests onepisodic- and semantic memory. The results showed that thosewho are physically active more than 4 hours had a better scoreon part of the semantic test but no effect was found in theepisodic test. This result indicates that physical activity not onlyaffects working memory, as was shown by previous research butalso has an effect in parts of the semantic long-term memory.

Although familiarity with a talker or accent is known to facilitate perception, it is not clear what underlies this phenomenon. Previous research has focused primarily on whether listeners can learn to associate novel phonetic characteristics with low-level units such as features or phonemes. However, this neglects the potential role of phonetic information at many other levels of representation. To address this shortcoming, this thesis investigated perceptual learning of systematic phonetic detail relating to higher levels of linguistic structure, including prosodic, grammatical and morphological contexts. Furthermore, in contrast to many previous studies, this research used relatively natural stimuli and tasks, thus maximising its relevance to perceptual learning in ordinary listening situations. This research shows that listeners can update their phonetic representations in response to incoming information and its relation to linguistic-structural context. In addition, certain patterns of systematic phonetic detail were more learnable than others. These findings are used to inform an account of how new information is integrated with prior experience in speech processing, within a framework that emphasises the importance of phonetic detail at multiple levels of representation.

The aim of this dissertation was to explore whether preschoolers understand that preferences differ over time and between people. The first goal was to determine if 3-, 4-, and 5-year-olds could appreciate that their future or “grown-up” preferences may differ from their current ones (self-future condition). This understanding was compared to children’s understanding of the preferences of a grown-up (adult-now condition), or the grown-up preferences of a same-aged peer (peer-future condition). Results from 3 experiments (N = 240) suggest that these types of reasoning develop substantially over the preschool years, and that children are generally proficient by 5 years of age. Results also indicate that thinking about one’s own future preferences is more difficult than thinking about the (future) preferences of others. The second goal of this dissertation was to explore the relations between reasoning about preferences and theory of mind (ToM) and executive function (EF) abilities. Correlational analyses revealed that children’s reasoning about their future preferences and those of others was associated with EF skills, but not with ToM. These findings provide a timely contribution to the expanding research on children’s future-oriented cognition. Implications for theories about perspective-taking abilities, more broadly, and future research are also discussed.

The capacity to mentally project the self into the future or, what has recently been termed “episodic foresight” is an emerging topic of study in developmental psychology. The aim of this dissertation was to review available research on this topic and explore its development in two groups of children: typically-developing preschoolers and children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). This dissertation had two main goals. The first goal was to explore whether tasks thought to measure episodic foresight in children are related and whether, as has been hypothesized, they were related to theory of mind (ToM) and executive function (EF). Study 1 showed that after controlling for age and language ability, episodic foresight tasks were not intercorrelated, nor were they individually related to ToM or EF tasks. Importantly, however, an episodic foresight composite score was related to several EF tasks. Specifically, the results suggested a significant relation between episodic foresight and inhibitory control. The second goal of this dissertation was to explore the development of episodic foresight in children with ASD. Specifically, I tested whether children with ASD would perform more poorly on a series of episodic foresight tasks than a mental-age matched group of typically-developing children. Study 2 revealed significant group differences on several episodic foresight tasks, suggesting that children with ASD showed impairments in thinking about themselves in the future. These results are a timely contribution to the research on episodic foresight and will hopefully aid in the further development of tasks that adequately measure this important cognitive ability in children.

Perceived social discrimination, a salient chronic psychosocial stressor, has an adverse effect on physical and mental health. Cumulative stress compromises adaptive physiologic processes and triggers changes in hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical (HPA) axis functioning. The hippocampus is critical for episodic memory and mediates the HPA stress response. Animal models have demonstrated increased vulnerability of the hippocampus to stress-induced morphological alterations and dysfunction. Previous research has shown that greater psychosocial stress is related to poorer episodic memory performance in older adults. Diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) studies strongly support the role of the uncinate fasciculus (UF) in episodic memory. Furthermore, psychosocial stress has been associated with white matter (WM) microstructural abnormalities in the UF. Although the effect of chronic psychosocial stress is well established, the effects of social discrimination on WM integrity and episodic memory are not well understood. In this study, we tested the hypothesis that greater perceived social discrimination in older adults is associated with poorer episodic memory performance and structural abnormalities of the UF tract. Twenty-eight participants (63.8 – 73 years, 57.1% female, 42.9% African American) reported experiences of discrimination (EoD) and perceived stress (PSS) and were assessed for episodic memory. High angular resolution diffusion imaging (HARDI) scans were analyzed with probabilistic tractography to examine associations of UF diffusion metrics with EoD scores and episodic memory performance. Spearman’s rank correlation determined a significant positive association between EoD and PSS scores (rs(28) = 0.45, p = 0.017), suggesting perceived discrimination is a chronic stressor and may be a social determinant of health. However, contrary to our expectations, neither EoD nor PSS were significantly related to episodic memory performance and UF diffusion metrics. Future longitudinal research to examine associations between perceived discrimination, episodic memory and WM microstructure in a large cohort is warranted.