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Research Poster PresentationsP O S T E R 7 4An Analytical Study of QuantifierComprehension with EyeTracking DataNicholas DalonzoFaculty Mentor: Dr. Patricia BrooksDepartment of PsychologyGrade-school children often make errors inuniversal quantifier interpretation for sentenceslike Every apple is in a bowl. Whether these errorsare due to children’s unfamiliarity with thecomplexities of sentence structure (faultygrammatical knowledge) or to processinglimitations (faulty attention or memory) is notknown. This study seeks to explore the mostcommon sources of children’s errors incomprehending sentences containing the universalquantifier every. We will also compare thecomprehension error rates found with passivevoicesentences like The cow was pulled by thehorse with those of sentences containing universalquantifiers. The experiment presented 23 children(ages 5 to 12) with pictures demonstrating aparticular relationship and asked the children tostate whether a spoken sentence matched thepicture shown. We measured eye-movements as thechild scrutinized the picture and came to aconclusion as to whether the sentence was true orfalse. Half of the quantifiers sentences had theuniversal quantifier modifying the container-noun(e.g., Every bowl has an apple in it) and the otherhalf had it modifying the object-noun (e.g., Everyapple is in a bowl). Half of the time the picturematched the sentence, and half of the time itcontained extra containers or objects (e.g., extrabowls for the sentence Every bowl has an apple init). We found that children made numerous errorswhen encountering pictures that depicted sets ofobjects in partial one-to-one correspondence, alongwith a sentence containing the quantifier every.This trend was more pronounced in the 5 to 9 agegrouping, denoting developmental differencesamongst our examined population. Additionally,children also made errors with the passivesentences which suggests a general difficulty inassigning syntactic representations to sentences.P O S T E R 7 5Effects of Curcumin onTau-Interactions in TransgenicDrosophila Melanogaster MotorNeuron and EyeKalpita Abhyankar, Tanya NelipaFaculty Mentor: Dr. Alejandra AlonsoDepartment of BiologyIt is pivotal to understand the mechanistic functionof synaptic breakdown that precedes in cell deathin Alzheimer's disease (AD) and otherneurodegenerative diseases. Accumulation ofhyperphosphorylated tau causes the disruption ofmicrotubules, which are related to synaptic lossand pathology of Alzheimer's disease. Impairedcognitive function and pathology of AD iscorrelated with this lesion. We have previouslyshown that the cytosolic Alzheimerhyperphosphorylated tau (AD P-tau) sequestersnormal tau, MAP1A, MAP1B and MAP2, whichresults in the inhibition of microtubule assemblyand disruption of microtubules and self assembleinto filaments. We would like to study the effects ofcurcumin, which is an active ingredient in the spiceturmeric, in causing reversal of the effects oftangles formed by hyperphosphorylated tau. Taupromotes the assembly and stabilizes microtubules.Our model of study is the Drosophila which has thetau homolog exhibiting 46% identity with thesequence of human tau protein and has similarfeatures such as microtubule-binding domain.Transgenic flies (Drosophila melanogaster) thatexpress the human tau in different phosphorylatedforms, wild type and mutations display importantfeatures of the human disorder. The effects ofcurcumin on pseudophosphorylated tau on thetransgenic Drosophila motor neuron and eye willbe explored.61