Browsing by Author "Dziobek, Derek"

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    Active Learning in a Neuroethics Course Positively Impacts Moral Judgment Development in Undergraduates
    (Faculty for Undergraduate Neuroscience, 2015-03-09) Abu-Odeh, Desiree; Dziobek, Derek; Torres Jimenez, Natalia; Barbey, Christopher; Dubinsky, Janet M
    The growing neuroscientific understanding of the biological basis of behaviors has profound social and ethical implications. To address the need for public awareness of the consequences of these advances, we developed an undergraduate neuroethics course, Neuroscience and Society, at the University of Minnesota. Course evolution, objectives, content, and impact are described here. To engage all students and facilitate undergraduate ethics education, this course employed daily reading, writing, and student discussion, case analysis, and team presentations with goals of fostering development of moral reasoning and judgment and introducing application of bioethical frameworks to topics raised by neuroscience. Pre- and post-course Defining Issues Test (DIT) scores and student end-of-course reflections demonstrated that course objectives for student application of bioethical frameworks to neuroethical issues were met. The active-learning, student-centered pedagogical approaches used to achieve these goals serve as a model for how to effectively teach neuroethics at the undergraduate level.
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    Face Preference and the Effect of Muscimol Inactivation of the Dentate Nucleus on Saccadic Eye Movements
    (2018-03) Dziobek, Derek
    The role of the dentate nucleus of the cerebellum in saccadic eye movements is poorly understood, as is the cerebellum’s contribution to social cognition. Based on past data implicating a direct, bi-synaptic projection from the deep cerebellar nuclei to the supplementary eye fields, we have developed an image preference task in which the preference a non-human primate has for looking at images of other primates (both human and non-human) and saccadic eye movement metrics are evaluated. Using this task, the innate image preference and saccade metrics were measured, as were the changes to them after the dentate nucleus was temporarily inactivated via injection of the GABA agonist muscimol. The resultant changes to the preference of face images and the various saccade metrics were differential depending on which nucleus was injected.