In earlier projects we have studied how new responses were learned. Understanding the processes by which new behaviors emerge is a fundamental problem in all areas of psychology. For example, in the study of development one must understand why one response form gives way to another as the organism gets older. Our own work on the origins of new behavior takes place in three domains: We have researched how a rat is shaped to press a bar, how a young bird learns to eat a piece of seed, and how humans learn a novel sequence of simple actions.
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Currently, our lab focuses on how timing affects learning and behavior. Animals, including humans, can make excellent estimates of temporal information and use this information to act in a wide variety of activities, including crossing the street, playing sports, and deciding when to speak. Whether it is seconds, hours, or even days we seem to know a great deal about when events occur and how long they last. For example, if you sit at a red light long enough you will conclude it is broken, suggesting that you must remember how long a traffic light usually takes before it changes. This sort of timing of arbitrary events is known as interval timing.
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Current work in animal cognition suggests that interval timing plays a very important role in guiding learning and behavior. There is an emerging consensus that most animals perceive and encode temporal information about their experiences. They seem to automatically store quantitative information about event durations and precise temporal information about the relationship between events. Furthermore, this information can be used in very flexible ways to solve problems. The ongoing work in this vein is seeking to understand all of the underlying processes. How is time perceived? How is it encoded and retrieved? How is temporal information used to make decisions about whether, when, and how to respond? Our projects, including behavioral studies with mice, rats, and humans are aimed at answering all of these questions about interval timing.
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Relatively little is known about the neural basis of interval timing. In order to explore the neural substrates underlying this behavior, we are doing genetic, pharmacological and lesion studies in mice and rats . The goal of all of these studies is to better understand the neural mechanisms of learning and temporal information processing.
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We also believe that it is important to understand how timing can be disturbed. Many psychiatric and neurological conditions distort one’s sense of time: people with depression cannot anticipate good things in their future, drug addicts are impulsive and cannot anticipate delayed consequences, and people with Schizophrenia often have disordered temporal cognition. Thus, an understanding of the psychology of time and the brain mechanisms that underlie it are likely to provide new ways of approaching these problems.
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