Undergraduates are encouraged to inquire about doing research in the lab. Please contact Paul Reber (preber@northwestern.edu or (847)467-1624) if you are interested.
Depending on experience and time willing to invest, a student may assist with current projects or begin his or her own. Below are summaries of current and past undergraduate projects.
Current Undergraduate Research
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Implicit Learning of Dot Patterns
Vickie Huang '05
SUMMARY -
Neural Correlates of Sexual Arousal in Heterosexual and Homosexual Men
Adam Safron '05
Men exhibit category-specific sexual arousal; their highest level of genital and subjective arousal is to erotic stimuli containing their preferred sex. This study used event-related fMRI to study whether this pattern would be reflected in the brains of homosexual (N = 11) and heterosexual (N = 11) men. Comparisons between preferred sexual stimuli and non-preferred stimuli revealed large networks of activity spanning multiple cortical and sub-cortical areas. Aggregate data from multiple nodes of a postulated arousal network were used to determine the sexual orientation of participants. This method had a high degree of fidelity (16/18) in discriminating heterosexual and homosexual men and represents a significant advance in psychophysiological measures of arousal. In addition, region of interest analysis revealed differential activity in the amygdala, a structure believed to mediate sexually dimorphic reproductive behaviors. Group differences are probably due to the more intensely positive responses to preferred sexual stimuli and less emotional responses to non-preferred stimuli in homosexual than heterosexual participants.
Past Undergraduate Projects
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Directed Forgetting of Faces
Ben Hirsch '05 -
INVESTIGATING NEURAL CORRELATES OF ENCODING AND DIRECTED FORGETTING USING EVENT-RELATED FMRI.
Robert Siwiec '02