Combating Food Insecurity Among College Students and the Logistical Challenges

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Description
Food Insecurity amongst college students is a growing issue in today’s society due to the lack of access to food and programs commonly used for food assistance. Logistical issues present a unique challenge in feeding food-insecure college students. And the

Food Insecurity amongst college students is a growing issue in today’s society due to the lack of access to food and programs commonly used for food assistance. Logistical issues present a unique challenge in feeding food-insecure college students. And the stigma associated with this food insecurity may cause students to avoid seeking assistance. Students are only able to address this challenge through 3 main solutions: pantries, meal swipe programs, and drive-thru pantries. Food insecurity challenges that individuals face can be found on Arizona State University campus. Currently, food insecurity is only addressed on campus through pantries and distribution centers. These are run through student-led organizations and typically are partnered with food banks or charities within the area. These solutions can be inconsistent and deal with logistic challenges like space, storage, and transportation. One of the proposed solutions to these challenges is programs like the Food Recovery Network.
Date Created
2022-05
Agent

Learning and retention of novel words in musicians and non-musicians: the impact of enriched auditory experience on behavioral performance and electrophysiologic measures

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Description
Music training is associated with measurable physiologic changes in the auditory pathway. Benefits of music training have also been demonstrated in the areas of working memory, auditory attention, and speech perception in noise. The purpose of this study

Music training is associated with measurable physiologic changes in the auditory pathway. Benefits of music training have also been demonstrated in the areas of working memory, auditory attention, and speech perception in noise. The purpose of this study was to determine whether long-term auditory experience secondary to music training enhances the ability to detect, learn, and recall new words.

Participants consisted of 20 young adult musicians and 20 age-matched non-musicians. In addition to completing word recognition and non-word detection tasks, each participant learned 10 nonsense words in a rapid word-learning task. All tasks were completed in quiet and in multi-talker babble. Next-day retention of the learned words was examined in isolation and in context. Cortical auditory evoked responses to vowel stimuli were recorded to obtain latencies and amplitudes for the N1, P2, and P3a components. Performance was compared across groups and listening conditions. Correlations between the behavioral tasks and the cortical auditory evoked responses were also examined.

No differences were found between groups (musicians vs. non-musicians) on any of the behavioral tasks. Nor did the groups differ in cortical auditory evoked response latencies or amplitudes, with the exception of P2 latencies, which were significantly longer in musicians than in non-musicians. Performance was significantly poorer in babble than in quiet on word recognition and non-word detection, but not on word learning, learned-word retention, or learned-word detection. CAEP latencies collapsed across group were significantly longer and amplitudes were significantly smaller in babble than in quiet. P2 latencies in quiet were positively correlated with word recognition in quiet, while P3a latencies in babble were positively correlated with word recognition and learned-word detection in babble. No other significant correlations were observed between CAEPs and performance on behavioral tasks.

These results indicated that, for young normal-hearing adults, auditory experience resulting from long-term music training did not provide an advantage for learning new information in either favorable (quiet) or unfavorable (babble) listening conditions. Results of the present study suggest that the relationship between music training and the strength of cortical auditory evoked responses may be more complex or too weak to be observed in this population.
Date Created
2017
Agent

Word Recognition and Learning: Effects of Hearing Loss and Amplification Feature

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Description

Two amplification features were examined using auditory tasks that varied in stimulus familiarity. It was expected that the benefits of certain amplification features would increase as the familiarity with the stimuli decreased. A total of 20 children and 15 adults

Two amplification features were examined using auditory tasks that varied in stimulus familiarity. It was expected that the benefits of certain amplification features would increase as the familiarity with the stimuli decreased. A total of 20 children and 15 adults with normal hearing as well as 21 children and 17 adults with mild to severe hearing loss participated. Three models of ear-level devices were selected based on the quality of the high-frequency amplification or the digital noise reduction (DNR) they provided. The devices were fitted to each participant and used during testing only. Participants completed three tasks: (a) word recognition, (b) repetition and lexical decision of real and nonsense words, and (c) novel word learning. Performance improved significantly with amplification for both the children and the adults with hearing loss. Performance improved further with wideband amplification for the children more than for the adults. In steady-state noise and multitalker babble, performance decreased for both groups with little to no benefit from amplification or from the use of DNR. When compared with the listeners with normal hearing, significantly poorer performance was observed for both the children and adults with hearing loss on all tasks with few exceptions. Finally, analysis of across-task performance confirmed the hypothesis that benefit increased as the familiarity of the stimuli decreased for wideband amplification but not for DNR. However, users who prefer DNR for listening comfort are not likely to jeopardize their ability to detect and learn new information when using this feature.

Date Created
2017-06-15
Agent