People
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Sara Levens, Ph.D. Graduate Student
B.A. in Psychology, Class of 2001 Sara is now a post doc at Stanford University. |
Research
I began my work here in the Phelps lab after graduating from UC Berkeley. I am in my second year here at NYU and I love it. My interests mainly center on the interactions between emotion and executive processes in the frontal lobes. Through my research I am attempting to understand how emotional information effects decision making and goal oriented behaviors.
Currently I have a number of behavioral studies running that are designed to look at how positive and negative valence, low and high arousal, and goal-laden information affects the executive process of inhibition in working memory. Inhibition acts as a filter for working memory; keeping active needed information while deactivating unneeded information. To examine this relationship I am using a Sternberg proactive interference paradigm introduced by Smith and Jonides (1999) with an emotional or goal component. The results of two finished behavioral studies, one using emotional words, and another using emotional pictures, indicate that when emotional stimuli are relevant to task completion inhibitory processing is facilitated. However, when emotional stimuli are not relevant to the task, and function instead as distracters, inhibition is unaffected (see abstract link below). These results contribute to the ongoing debate of if and how emotion effects working memory by introducing data indicating that emotional information is processed differentially from neutral, only when it is central to task completion. Due to these results a currently ongoing experiment is attempting to understand the interaction between emotion and inhibitory processing by varying valence and arousal levels to determine what about emotional stimuli cause the differential processing.
An additional experiment that is currently nearing completion
examines how goal-laden stimuli influence the process of information in working
memory. The same Sternberg proactive interference paradigm was altered to
induce a goal associated with certain themed stimuli. The intent was to determine
if goal oriented information becomes salient in a similar fashion as emotional
information and to also determine how and if goal oriented information is
processed differently in working memory accounting for goal oriented decisions
and behaviors. Preliminary data reveal very significant enhancement of inhibitory
processing for goal oriented information relevant to task completion, while
no facilitation for unrelevant task distracters.
This summer and next fall the described behavioral studies will be applied
to the fMRI scanner to determine which areas of the prefrontal cortex show
a change in activation patterns for emotional and goal oriented inhibitory
processing in comparison with neutral inhibitory processing. In addition I
am currently organizing a frontal lobe patient group with the help of Dr.
Orin Devinsky at the NYU Epilepsy and Neurology Center with the intent of
conducting my behavioral studies on frontal lobe patients in the near future.
Recent Publications
Levens, Sara M., Phelps, E.A. (2008). Emotion Processing Effects on Interference Resolution in Working Memory. Emotion, 8(2): 267-280. [PDF]
Poster Presentations
Levens, S. L., Sanders, E. L., Arenas, M., Phelps, E. A. of New York University, New York, NY 10003.EMOTION PROCESSING EFFECTS ON INHIBITORY FUNCTION IN WORKING MEMORY [Poster Abstract]
Roberts, N.A., Levens, S.M., McCoy, K., Werner, K.H., Beer, J.S., Scabini, D., Knight, R.T.*, & Levenson, R.W. of University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720. ORBITOFRONTAL CORTEX AND ACTIVATION OF DEFENSIVE RESPONSES [Poster Abstract]
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