Date of Award

2022

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Natural Sciences

First Advisor

Casto, Kathleen

Area of Concentration

Neurobiology

Abstract

The experience of trauma during childhood is not uncommon, and highly traumatic childhoods are associated with an increased risk of psychiatric and somatic disorders, as well as other adverse life outcomes. Some of the neurodevelopmental effects of childhood trauma are known, including reduced cognitive abilities and altered functional brain activity in regions important for cognition, memory, and emotional processing. However, the precise relationship between altered patterns of brain activity in traumatized individuals and cognitive dysfunction is not well understood. This thesis aimed to investigate the effects of childhood trauma on prefrontal cortex activity and executive functioning skills. Hemodynamic brain activity was measured in twenty participants using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) during a Stroop color-word association task with incongruent, congruent, and baseline conditions. Participants then filled out a series of self-report surveys about their positive and negative childhood experiences. I hypothesized that participants reporting higher levels of childhood trauma would perform worse on the Stroop task, and also show less Stroop-related hemodynamic activity in the prefrontal cortex. Stroop interference was produced in all but 2 participants, but there was no overall significant relationship between functional hemodynamic activity in the prefrontal cortex and childhood trauma. Further, results did not show a relationship between childhood trauma and task performance in terms of response speed or overall accuracy. These results have implications for our understanding of the neural correlates of executive dysfunction caused by childhood trauma, which seem to be caused by widespread network abnormalities within the brain rather than abnormalities in discrete regions.

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