Michele K Moscicki

Michele K Moscicki
MacEwan University · Department of Psychology

Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology

About

18
Publications
5,202
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
326
Citations
Introduction
I love to teach and inspire students. I am primarily interested in teaching at the post-secondary level while also researching student and animal responses to stress, building stress resilience, and best teaching practices for higher education.
Additional affiliations
July 2012 - present
University of Alberta
Position
  • Lecturer
Description
  • I have taught the following courses (# times): PSYCO 104 - Intro Psychology (2) PSYCO 302 - Biology of Stress and Coping (7) PSYCO 371 - Neurobiology of Learning and Memory (1) PSYCO 372 - Behavioural Genetics (5) PSYCO 381 - Learning and Behaviour (2)
September 2009 - September 2014
University of Alberta
Position
  • PhD student; Lab Manager
Description
  • For my PhD, I studied behavioural and neurological responses to stress using convict cichlid fish as a model species. Throughout my degree I completed a variety of laboratory (behavioural and histological) as well as field (SCUBA) studies.
September 2006 - September 2009
University of Alberta
Position
  • Master's Student
Description
  • My MSC thesis was about the bioacoustics of Mexican and Boreal chickadee calls. I also helped with operant studies on chickadee learning behaviour, neuroanatomical studies of chickadee brains, and catching and recording chickadees in the wild.
Education
September 2009 - September 2014
University of Alberta
Field of study
  • Psychology
September 2006 - September 2009
University of Alberta
Field of study
  • Psychology
September 2002 - April 2006
University of Windsor
Field of study
  • Behaviour, Cognition, and Neuroscience (BCN)

Publications

Publications (18)
Article
Full-text available
Research into growth mindset, the belief that attributes are malleable, has increased dramatically in the last 30 years, leading to an explosion in the number of mindset domains studied. Given this plethora of mindset domains, there is comparatively little work investigating mindset domain relationships. Further, with expanding interest in growth m...
Article
Full-text available
Carotenoid pigments have myriad functions in fish, including coloration and immunity. The “carotenoid trade-off hypothesis” posits that dietary limitation of carotenoids imposes constraints on animals to allocate to one function at the expense of another. This hypothesis rarely has been tested in fish. We quantified tissue carotenoids in breeding a...
Article
Full-text available
Cerebral lateralization, the partitioning of functions into a certain hemisphere of the brain, is ubiquitous among vertebrates. Evidence suggests that the cognitive processing of a stimulus is performed with a specific hemisphere depending in part upon the emotional valence of the stimulus (i.e. whether it is appetitive or aversive). Recent work ha...
Article
Full-text available
Female convict cichlids (Amatitlania siquia) exhibit bright orange ventral coloration that males lack. The behavioral implications of this color are poorly understood, particularly in naturally occurring populations where female coloration could play a role in the expression of territorial nest-guarding behaviors. In this field experiment, monogamo...
Article
Full-text available
How an organism deals with stressors is an integral component of survival. Recent research has shown that differences in a well-studied personality axis in fish, the shy-bold axis, relate to stress-coping behaviours. Bold fish tend to cope in a proactive manner (e.g. fighting) while shy fish cope more reactively (e.g. freezing). Because bold fish b...
Article
Full-text available
Neuronal populations in the songbird nidopallium increase in activity the most to conspecific vocalizations relative to heterospecific songbird vocalizations or artificial stimuli such as tones. Here, we tested whether the difference in neural activity between conspecific and heterospecific vocalizations is due to acoustic differences or to the deg...
Article
Full-text available
Several songbird species sing at higher frequencies (i.e. higher pitch) when anthropogenic noise levels are elevated. Such frequency shifting is thought to be an adaptation to prevent masking of bird song by anthropogenic noise. However, no study of this phenomenon has examined how vegetative differences between noisy and quiet sites influence freq...
Article
Full-text available
Most researchers measure absolute pitch (AP) using note-naming tasks that presume expertise with the scales of Western music. If note naming constitutes the only measure, then by fiat, only trained musicians can possess AP. Here we report on an AP test that does not require a note-naming response. The participants were 15 AP possessors and 45 nonpo...
Article
Full-text available
Cerebral lateralization, the partitioning of cognitive function preferentially into one hemisphere of the brain, is a trait ubiquitous among vertebrates. Some species exhibit population level lateralization, where the pattern of cerebral lateralization is the same for most members of that species; however, other species show only individual level l...
Article
Full-text available
Songbird auditory areas (i.e., CMM and NCM) are preferentially activated to playback of conspecific vocalizations relative to heterospecific and arbitrary noise. Here, we asked if the neural response to auditory stimulation is not simply preferential for conspecific vocalizations but also for the information conveyed by the vocalization. Black-capp...
Article
Full-text available
An important first step in characterizing a vocalization is to classify, describe, and measure the elements of that vocalization. Here, this methodology is employed to study the chick-a-dee call of the boreal chickadee (Poecile hudsonicus). The note types (A, B, C, D, and D(h)) in a sample of boreal chickadee calls are identified and described, spe...
Article
Full-text available
sees sustainable scholarly publishing as an inherently collaborative enterprise connecting authors, nonprofit publishers, academic institutions, research libraries, and research funders in the common goal of maximizing access to critical research. BioOne (www.bioone.org) is an electronic aggregator of bioscience research content, and the online hom...
Article
This research examined generality of the phylogenetic rule that birds discriminate frequency ranges more accurately than mammals. Human absolute pitch chroma possessors accurately tracked transitions between frequency ranges. Independent tests showed that they used note naming (pitch chroma) to remap the tones into ranges; neither possessors nor no...
Article
In many species, males use auditory signals to attract females and females select males based on their dominance status. Here we show that information on dominance status in male black-capped chickadees, Poecile atricapillus, a small, temperate, North American songbird, can be extracted from individual songs. We found that the relative amplitude of...
Article
Full-text available
A first step to understanding how a species communicates acoustically is to identify, categorize, and quantify the acoustic parameters of the elements that make up their vocalizations. The "chick-a-dee" call notes of the chestnut-backed chickadee (Poecile rufescens) were sorted into four call note categories, A, C, D, and Dh notes, based on their a...
Article
Full-text available
To understand the communicative functions of any vocalization it is important to first classify, describe, and measure the elements of that vocalization. Mexican (Poecile sclateri) and boreal (P. hudsonica ) chickadees both produce a name-sake chick-a-dee call. Here, the note types present in samples of Mexican and boreal chick-a-dee calls are iden...
Article
Although reproductive (RF) and non-reproductive (NRF) female round goby are attracted to washings of conspecific reproductive males and RF, respectively, behavioural responses of females to synthesized steroids has not been studied. We tested attraction and avoidance of RF and NRF to different blends of steroids previously shown to be either produc...
Article
Full-text available
Cerebral lateralization, the partitioning of cognitive function preferentially into one hemisphere of the brain, is a trait ubiquitous among vertebrates. Some species exhibit population level lateralization, where the pattern of cerebral lateralization is the same for most members of ...

Network

Cited By