Browsing by Author "Oguz, Kaya"

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    Article
    The Effects of Late-Onset Depression on Brain Activity During an Episodic Memory Task
    (Turkish Neuropsychiatry Assoc-Turk Noropsikiyatri Dernegi, 2025) Gulec, Zeynep Naz; Ercan, Melis; Erdogan, Yigit; Oguz, Kaya; Uyar, Aslihan; Burhanoglu, Birce Begum; Gonul, Ali Saffet
    Introduction: Late-onset depression (LOD) has been implicated in irreversible cognitive decline, potentially mirroring early Alzheimer's Disease (AD) pathology. This study aimed to investigate brain activity differences during an episodic memory (EM) task in LOD patients compared to healthy controls (HC). Methods: We recruited 15 LOD patients and 13 HC matched for age and gender. Participants completed a face-name association task during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) focusing on both the encoding and retrieval phases of EM. Results: The statistical contrast between the groups revealed that the HC group showed increased activity in the left visual association cortex (VAC) and left caudate compared to the LOD group during the encoding task. During the face recognition task, the HC group showed increased activity in the right caudate, and during the name recognition task, they showed increased activity in the right frontal eye field (FEF) compared to the LOD group. Conclusion: The differences observed between the HC and LOD groups in the VAC, caudate, and FEF suggest early changes in maintaining attention, goal-directed learning, EM formation, and coordination of information from storage to retrieval before apparent impairment develops in LOD. Although we did not find statistically significant activations in areas linked to increased vulnerability to AD, our findings of hypoactivation regions responsible for visual processing and attentional orienting in LOD patients are consistentwith hypoactivation patterns observed in AD patients in previous research. These results enhance our understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying memory impairments in LOD and their potential overlap with AD pathology.
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    Conference Paper
    Exploring Bio-Actors of the Cities through Serious Games
    (SIGraDi 2024 Proceedings of the XXVIII Conference of the Iberoamerican Society of Digital Graphics, 2024) Ercan, İrem; Oguz, Kaya
    This study focuses on the importance of biodiversity in protecting the urban ecosystem in urban planning. Considering cities as an ecosystem, city actors should communicate collaboratively within this ecosystem. Urban actors include not only humans but also other bio-based creatures. For the communication in the city through design, collecting information about bio-actors with their habitats, serious games can play an important role. Since serious games are useful for educating players, city inhabitants can be informed through these games. It was chosen as a method that provides a space to players for learning by entertaining. Therefore, the game 'My City Mate: Exploring Bio-actors of the City', developed on the Twine platform, offers players the opportunity to get to know the bio-actors of a fictional city environment with the visual, audio and text-based information it provides. Lastly, this research analyzes players' learning and interaction levels with this game through surveys.