Brain Imaging Lab

About Me

I am a first-year graduate student in the Kelley lab. Generally, I am interested in the reward system and self-regulatory behaviors. More specifically, I use eating behavior as a primary reward model to examine this system and variations in behavior. My current projects exploit top-down influences (i.e. food advertisements) as well as bottom-up mediators (i.e. genetics) to look at how the interactions of these might affect eating behavior.

Prior to my arrival at Dartmouth, I worked at the NIH under Alex Martin in the Laboratory of Brain and Cognition where I studied the neural correlates of food reward, gustatory processing, and food representation in obese and lean populations. Before this, I completed my B.S. in Psychology (neuroscience concentration) at Penn State.

Contact

Kristina.M.Rapuano.GR@Dartmouth.edu
LinkedIn

Journal Articles

Simmons, W.K., Rapuano, K.M., Kallman, S.J., Ingeholm, J.E., Gotts, S.J., Knuth, N.D., Hall, K.D., Martin, A. (In preparation). Perception of appetizing food images leads to automatic and obligatory activation of taste property information in gustatory cortex.

Simmons, W.K., Rapuano, K.M., Ingeholm, J.E., Avery, J., Kallman, S.J., Hall, K.D., Martin, A. (Under review). The ventral pallidum and orbitofrontal cortex support food pleasantness inferences.

Talkington, W.J., Rapuano, K.M., Hitt, L., Frum, C.A., Lewis, J.W. (2012). Humans mimicking animals: A cortical hierarchy for human vocal communication sounds. The Journal of Neuroscience, 32(23):8084–8093.

Lewis, J.W., Frum, C.A., Brefczynski-Lewis, J.A., Talkington, W.J., Walker, N.A., Rapuano, K.M., Kovach, A.L. (2011). Cortical network differences in the sighted versus early blind for recognition of human-produced action sound. Human Brain Mapping, 32:2241–2255.

Conference Presentations

Simmons, W.K., Ingeholm, J.E., Rapuano, K.M., Kallman, S.J., Hall, K.D., Martin, A. Overlapping and distinct neural representations of anticipating and consuming taste rewards. Society for Neuroscience, 2012.

Ingeholm, J.E., Simmons, W.K., Rapuano, K.M., Kallman, S.J., Hall, K.D., Martin, A. Overlapping and distinct neural representations of anticipating and consuming taste rewards. Organization for Human Brain Mapping, 2012.

Rapuano, K.M., Simmons, W.K., Ingeholm, J.E., Knuth, N., Hall, K.D. Inferences about food pleasantness modulate activity in the ventral pallidum. Cognitive Neuroscience Society, 2012.

Ingeholm, J.E., Simmons, W.K., Kallman, S.J., Rapuano, K.M., Hall, K.D., Martin, A. An fMRI stimulus paradigm for measuring anticipation of primary rewards. Organization for Human Brain Mapping, 2011.

Robustelli, B.L., Wallace, G.L., Dixon, E.E., Rapuano, K.M., Martin, A. The effects of inversion and Gaussian noise on face recognition in autism spectrum disorders. Society for Neuroscience, 2011.

Simmons, W.K., Kallman, S.J., Rapuano, K.M., Ingeholm, J.E., Hall, K.D., Martin, A. Perception of appetizing food images leads to automatic and obligatory activation of taste property information in gustatory cortex. Society for Neuroscience, 2011.

Rapuano, K.M., Simmons, W.K., Kallman, S.J, Ingeholm, J.E., Hall, K.D., Martin, A. Taste-localized gustatory cortex responds to viewing pictures of appetizing foods. NIMH Retreat, 2011.

Dixon E.E., Robustelli B.L., Rapuano K.M., Martin A., Wallace G.L. Sleep quality and its behavioral correlates in adolescents and young adults with autism spectrum disorders. NIH Research Festival, 2011.

Talkington, W.J., Rapuano, K.M., Frum, C.A., Lewis, J.W. Humans mimicking animals: Implications for species-specific vocalization processing in human cortex. Society for Neuroscience, 2010.

Rapuano, K.M., Talkington, W.J., Frum, C.A., Lewis, J.W. Humans mimicking animals: Implications for species-specific vocalization processing in human cortex. Columbia Undergraduate Science Journal Symposium, 2010.

Lewis, J.W., Rapuano, K.M., Frum, C.A., Cortical networks for sound recognition in the congenitally blind. 3rd Regional IDeA symposium of Biomedical Research Excellence, 2009.