Anastasia Sares

Colorado State University | CSU · Department of Psychology

The NIMH Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) initiative seeks to utilize multidimensional patterns of socio-cognitive behavior to improve understanding of mental illness. We aimed to evaluate the psychometric properties of a subset of RDoC tasks. Specifically, we investigated two positive valence tasks and five cognitive tasks. Participants ( N = 320)...

For individuals with hearing loss, even successful speech communication comes at a cost. Cochlear implants transmit degraded information, specifically for voice pitch, which demands extra and sustained listening effort. The current study hypothesized that abnormal pitch patterns contribute to the additional listening effort, even in non-tonal langu...

Purpose Greater recognition of the impact of hearing loss on cognitive functions has led speech/hearing clinics to focus more on auditory memory outcomes. Typically evaluated by scoring participants' recall on a list of unrelated words after they have heard the list read out loud, this method implies pitch and timing variations across words. Here,...

Objective As part of the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) initiative, the NIMH seeks to improve experimental measures of cognitive and positive valence systems for use in intervention research. However, many RDoC tasks have not been psychometrically evaluated as a battery of measures. Our aim was to examine the factor structure of 7 such tasks chose...

Objective Deficits in cognitive ability are common among patients with schizophrenia. The MATRICS Consensus Cognitive Battery (MCCB) was designed to assess cognitive ability in studies of patients diagnosed with schizophrenia and has demonstrated high test-retest reliability with minimal practice effects, even in multi-site trials. However, given t...

Listeners can use the way people speak (prosody) or what people say (semantics) to infer vocal emotions. It can be speculated that bilinguals and musicians can better use the former rather than the latter compared to monolinguals and non-musicians. However, the literature to date has offered mixed evidence for this prosodic bias. Bilinguals and mus...

For individuals with hearing loss, even successful speech communication comes at a cost. Cochlear implants transmit degraded acoustic, specifically pitch, information, which demands extra and sustained listening effort. The current study hypothesized that abnormal pitch patterns contribute to the additional listening effort, even in non-tonal langu...

Auditory memory is an important everyday skill evaluated more and more frequently in clinical settings as there is recently a greater recognition of the cost of hearing loss to cognitive systems. Testing often involves reading a list of unrelated items aloud; but prosodic variations in pitch and timing across the list can affect the number of items...

Introduction A singer’s or speaker’s Fach (voice type) should be appraised based on acoustic cues characterizing their voice. Instead, in practice, it is often influenced by the individual’s physical appearance. This is especially distressful for transgender people who may be excluded from formal singing because of perceived mismatch between their...

Background and aims: Social determinants of health (SDoHs) impact the development and course of schizophrenia-spectrum psychotic disorders (SSPDs). Yet, we found no published scholarly reviews of psychometric properties and pragmatic utility of SDoH assessments among people with SSPDs. We aim to review those aspects of SDoH assessments. Study des...

Individuals with misophonia, a disorder involving extreme sound sensitivity, report significant anger, disgust, and anxiety in response to select but usually common sounds. While estimates of prevalence within certain populations such as college students have approached 20%, it is currently unknown what percentage of people experience misophonic re...

Persistent developmental stuttering is a speech disorder that primarily affects normal speech fluency but encompasses a complex set of symptoms ranging from reduced sensorimotor integration to socioemotional challenges. Here, we investigated the whole brain structural connectome and its topological alterations in adults who stutter. Diffusion weigh...

Introduction Individuals with persistent developmental stuttering display deficits in aligning motor actions to external cues (i.e., sensorimotor synchronization). Diffusion imaging studies point to stuttering-associated differences in dorsal, not ventral, white matter pathways, and in the cerebellar peduncles. Here, we studied microstructural whit...

Stuttering is a disorder that impacts the smooth flow of speech production and is associated with a deficit in sensorimotor integration. In a previous experiment, individuals who stutter were able to vocally compensate for pitch shifts in their auditory feedback, but they exhibited more variability in the timing of their corrective responses. In th...

Speech timing deficits have been proposed as a causal factor in the disorder of stuttering. The question of whether individuals who stutter have deficits in nonspeech timing is one that has been revisited often, with conflicting results. Here, we uncover subtle differences in a manual metronome synchronization task that included tempo changes with...

Persistent developmental stuttering affects close to 1% of adults and is thought to be a problem of sensorimotor integration. Previous research has demonstrated that individuals who stutter respond differently to changes in their auditory feedback while speaking. Here we explore a number of changes that accompany alterations in the feedback of pitc...

Purpose Musical training is often linked to enhanced auditory discrimination, but the relative roles of pitch and time in music and speech are unclear. Moreover, it is unclear whether pitch and time processing are correlated across individuals and how they may be affected by attention. This study aimed to examine pitch and time processing in speech...

This study investigates the functional neuroanatomy of harmonic music perception with fMRI. We presented short pieces of Western classical music to nonmusicians. The ending of each piece was systematically manipulated in the following four ways: Standard Cadence (expected resolution), Deceptive Cadence (moderate deviation from expectation), Modulat...

The synaptic vesicle protein, synaptotagmin I, is a multifunctional protein required for several steps in the synaptic vesicle cycle. It is primarily composed of two calcium-binding domains, C(2)A and C(2)B. Within each of these domains, a polylysine motif has been identified that is proposed to mediate specific functions within the synaptic vesicl...