Deana Davalos

Colorado State University | CSU · Department of Psychology

Research suggests that spending time in nature is associated with numerous human behavioral health benefits, including improved executive functioning abilities, enhanced recovery from stressful situations, better mental health, and better educational outcomes. Greener neighborhoods also tend to have positive population-level health outcomes. Althou...

Participation in psychosocial enrichment activities, such as music and arts programming, have shown potential to delay or reduce functional decline - without adverse effects that can be associated with pharmaceuticals. The performing-arts programming described in this community case study was inspired by a community music program called B-Sharp Mus...

Objectives We sought to assess the feasibility and acceptability of an adaptive riding program with dyads (persons living with dementia, family care partners) and a gardening comparison condition. Design This is a two-arm (adaptive riding and adaptive gardening), mixed methods, convergent, feasibility study that occurred February 2019-June 2019....

Background: There is a critical need to develop effective interventions for cognitive impairments associated with dementia-related disorders (i.e., Alzheimer's disease, frontotemporal dementia, mild cognitive impairment). Prospective memory (PM), or the ability to create and carry out future intentions, is one cognitive domain that is impaired in...

(1) Introduction: Caring for an adult with dementia is both challenging and rewarding. Research indicates that community-based, social support, and/or arts engagement interventions can play a key role in ameliorating the negative outcomes associated with caregiving while enhancing its more positive attributes. This study explores the psychosocial o...

Introduction: Dementia has been described as the greatest global challenge for healthcare in the 21st century. Pharmaceutical interventions have dominated dementia treatment despite limited efficacy. There is increasing interest in alternatives to delay the progression of cognitive decline, such as community-based programs, promoting social and st...

Approximately 270,000 seniors (55+) in the U.S. engage in volunteering through Senior Corps’ programs (Corporation for National Community and Service, 2016). Volunteering in older adulthood has been consistently connected with psychological, physical, and cognitive well-being (Carr, 2018), with a moderate level of volunteering considered optimal (W...

High-risk drinking is prevalent in university-attending emerging adults. This coincides with a critical time for the development of higher level cognitive and emotional processing and underlying neurobiological mechanisms. Cognitive and emotional processing seems to have a particularly sensitive relationship with alcohol. The current study sought t...

There is a larger proportion and number of older adults in the labor force than ever before. Furthermore, older adults in the workforce are working until later ages. Although a great deal of research has examined physical health and well-being of working older adults, less research has focused on cognitive functioning. The purpose of this article i...

Objective: Executive dysfunction in college students who have had an acute traumatic brain injury was investigated. The cognitive, behavioral, and metacognitive effects on college students who endorsed experiencing a brain injury were specifically explored. Participants: 121 college students who endorsed a mild TBI and 121 college students with...

Schizophrenia is a complex and often disabling disorder that is characterized by a wide range of social, emotional, and cognitive deficits. Increasing research suggests that the greatest social and cognitive therapeutic impact comes from early identification. The present study applied a well-established neurophysiological paradigm in the schizophre...

Time perception has been described as a fundamental skill needed to engage in a number of higher level cognitive processes essential to successfully navigate everyday life (e.g., planning, sequencing, etc.) Temporal processing is often thought of as a basic neural process that impacts a variety of other cognitive processes. Others, however, have ar...

Clinicians often have difficulty distinguishing between various forms of dementia to achieve a correct diagnosis. Little research has been done to examine whether awareness of one’s cognitive deficits, or metacognitive monitoring, might differ between dementia diagnoses, thereby providing an additional means of differentiating between dementia subt...

Sensory gating function has been investigated through measurement of the P50 evoked potential. However, the susceptibility of auditory P50 sensory gating to attentional modulation remains unclear. We sought to investigate the effects of vigilance (sustaining alertness across multiple recording blocks) and visual distraction (watching a muted movie...

A randomized placebo controlled trial was conducted to examine the effect of DHA on gestational length and cognitive development. 115 pregnant women were supplemented with 300 mg DHA/d or placebo during pregnancy and thru the first 3 mo of breastfeeding (BF). Bayley Scales of Infant Development (BSID) were administered at 4 mo and 1y. Dietary DHA i...

The objective of the Omega Smart Baby Project was to determine if supplementing pregnant/breastfeeding mothers with DHA would improve infants’ neuropsychological development. One hundred and fifteen women with singleton pregnancies were given either a placebo or DHA supplement of 300 mg a day during the third trimester and first three months of the...

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and childhood-onset psychosis (COP) are chronic, heterogeneous disorders with symptoms that frequently co-occur, but the etiology of their comorbidity is unknown. Studies of each disorder indicate that both ADHD and COP are associated with a range of neuropsychological weaknesses, but few neuropsychol...

Temporal processing, or processing time-related information, appears to play a significant role in a variety of vital psychological functions. One of the main confounds to assessing the neural underpinnings and cognitive correlates of temporal processing is that behavioral measures of timing are generally confounded by other supporting cognitive pr...

Previous research has established that patients with schizophrenia experience impairments in depth perception, distance perception, motion perception, and abnormal spatial frequency sensitivity, in addition to exhibiting reduced susceptibility to stereoptical illusions. These visual deficits affect a variety of processes that are needed to successf...

Research exploring the effects of prenatal maternal depression on a developing fetus and child is underrepresented in the literature. Empirical papers have typically focused on the effects of postpartum depression (after birth) instead of prepartum depression (before birth). Disparate empirical findings have produced ongoing debate regarding the ef...

Emotional stimuli generally command more brain processing resources than non-emotional stimuli, but the magnitude of this effect is subject to voluntary control. Cognitive reappraisal represents one type of emotion regulation that can be voluntarily employed to modulate responses to emotional stimuli. Here, the late positive potential (LPP), a spec...

Executive functions and extraversion have been linked to similar neurological substrates. Participants were tested on a variety of tasks that assessed performance on three components of executive functioning (i.e., shifting, updating, and inhibition) and two measures of extraversion (Eysenck Personality Questionnaire-Revised and Carver and White’s...

Deficits in temporal judgment in schizophrenia have been observed in behavioral and electrophysiological studies for years. The functional neuroanatomy of temporal judgment in schizophrenia is, however, poorly understood. Recent neurophysiological research suggests that timing deficits in this population may not be widespread across all timing task...

Introduction. The present study examined the relationship between metacognition (i.e., "thinking about thinking") and depression. More specifically, the depressive realism hypothesis (Alloy & Abramson, 1979), which posits that depressed people have a more accurate view of reality than nondepressed people, was tested. Methods. Nondepressed, mildly d...

During the last two decades there has been an increase in research focusing on the effects of maternal depression on the mother infant bond. Research in this field has apparently developed out of; a recognition of a relatively higher prevalence of postpartum maternal depression than once believed and recurring observations of differences in mother/...

P50 suppression deficits have been documented in clinical and nonclinical populations, but the behavioral correlates of impaired auditory sensory gating remain poorly understood. In the present study, we examined the relationship between P50 gating and healthy adults' performance on cognitive inhibition tasks. On the basis of load theory (Lavie, Hi...

Cholinergic agonists and, more specifically, nicotine, have been found to enhance a number of cognitive processes. The effect of nicotine on temporal processing is not known. The use of behavioral measures of temporal processing to measure its effect could be confounded by the general effects of nicotine on attention. Mismatch negativity (MMN) has...

Deficits in sensory gating are a common feature of schizophrenia. Failure of inhibitory gating mechanisms, shown by poor suppression of evoked responses to repeated auditory stimuli, has been previously studied using EEG methods. These methods yield information about the temporal characteristics of sensory gating deficits, but do not identify brain...

This study examined the contributions of general slowing and task-specific deficits to age-related changes in Stroop interference. Nine hundred thirty-eight participants aged 20 to 89 years completed an abbreviated Stroop color-naming task and a subset of 281 participants also completed card-sorting, simple reaction time, and choice reaction time t...

The current study examined the contributions of general slowing and frontal decline to age differences in fluid intelligence. Participants aged 20-89 years completed Block Design, Matrix Reasoning, simple reaction time, choice reaction time, Wisconsin Card Sorting, and Tower of London tasks. Age-related declines in fluid intelligence, speed of proc...

Temporal processing underlies many aspects of human perception, performance and cognition. The present study used fMRI to examine the functional neuroanatomy of a temporal discrimination task and to address two questions highlighted by previous studies: (1) the effect of task difficulty on neuronal activation and (2) the involvement of the dorsolat...

The question of whether fluid intelligence can be differentiated from general intelligence in older adults is addressed. Data indicate that the developmental pattern of performance on fluid tasks differs from the pattern of general intelligence. These results suggest that it is important to identify changes in fluid cognitive functions associated w...

Aging is associated with changes in automatic processing of task-irrelevant stimuli, and this may lead to functional disturbances including repeated orienting to nonnovel events and distraction from task. The effect of age on automatic processing of time-dependent stimulus features was investigated by measurement of the auditory mismatch negativity...

Timing deficits in schizophrenia have been noted in several behavioral studies. However, the involvement of mediating factors, such as inattention, has not been ruled out as contributing to these effects. Mismatch negativity (MMN), an electrophysiological measure, may provide a more direct index of stimulus processing ability in individuals with sc...

The authors examined the roles of perceived parental school support and family communication in the context of delinquent behaviors in Mexican American and White non-Latino adolescents. Family communication was defined as the degree to which adolescents endorsed that they communicated with their parents about a variety of topics. The Parental Schoo...

The contributions of working memory, inhibition, and fluid intelligence to performance on the Tower of Hanoi (TOH) and Tower of London (TOL) were examined in 85 undergraduate participants. All three factors accounted for significant variance on the TOH, but only fluid intelligence accounted for significant variance on the TOL. When the contribution...

By studying neuropsychological performance in children genetically at-risk for schizophrenia, greater understanding may be obtained regarding the developmental processes of schizophrenia and associated cognitive weaknesses. A variety of cognitive deficits in genetically at-risk children have been reported. The present study was designed to examine...

The relative sensitivity of mismatch negativity (MMN) amplitude to small changes in temporal (i.e. timing) deviance of an ongoing stimulus train was investigated. MMN was measured at Fz in response to 3.75-15% decrements of inter-stimulus interval from a 400 ms standard with a deviant probability of 1/15. This parameter space represents the smalles...

Temporal processing has received scant attention in the literature pertaining to cognitive deficits in patients with schizophrenia. Previous research suggests that patients with schizophrenia exhibit temporal perception deficits on both auditory and visual stimuli. The current study investigated the effects of interval manipulation to (1) replicate...

Temporal processing deficits have been noted in behavioral studies assessing patients with schizophrenia. The current study sought to explore the physiology of temporal perception while controlling the effects of motivation, attention and other cognitive processes that may contribute to behavioral measures of temporal processing. Mismatch negativit...

Neurophysiological investigations of the past two decades have consistently demonstrated a deficit in sensory gating associated with schizophrenia. Phillips & Silverstein interpret this impairment as being consistent with cognitive coordination dysfunction. However, the physiological mechanisms that underlie sensory gating have not been shown to in...

Characteristics of time perception have not been well documented in patients with schizophrenia. The current study investigated time estimation to (1) test whether visual and auditory time perception varied between patients and controls, (2) assess the degree to which patients and controls can differentiate changes in experimental intervals, and (3...

Schizophrenia is viewed by most as having a neuropsychological component, with deficits primarily occurring in the areas of attention/concentration, memory, and executive functioning. These deficits often contribute to difficulties in everyday living and social functioning. The purpose of this study is to examine the efficacy of cognitive rehabilit...

The aim of this literature review was to follow up on recommendations set forth in 1996 reviews by the Society for Nuclear Medicine Brain Imaging Council (SNMBIC) and the Therapeutics and Technology Assessment Subcommittee of the American Academy of Neurology (TTASAAN) regarding the use of single-photon emission computerized tomography (SPECT) with...

Schizophrenia spectrum disorders are currently viewed as having a neuropsychological basis included in the etiology. Cognitive deficits that occur in schizophrenia are primarily observed in the areas of attention–concentration, memory, and planning. These abilities are commonly viewed under the broader spectrum of executive functioning. Research ha...

. Schizophrenia spectrum disorders are currently viewed as having a neuropsychological basis included in the etiology. Cognitive deficits that occur in schizophrenia are primarily observed in the areas of attention–concentration, memory, and planning. These abilities are commonly viewed under the broader spectrum of executive functioning. Research...

With a growing Mexican American population and an increasing dropout rate predicted for this group, research is needed to examine ways of deterring this trend and increasing retention rates. The current study examined extracurricular activity, perception of school, and ethnic identification, and the association with school retention rates among Mex...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Colorado State University, 2000. Includes bibliographical references.