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Full-Text Articles in Neurosciences
Prenatal Ethanol Exposure Impairs Performance On Spatial And Tactile Sequential Discrimination Task In Juvenile Rats, Caleb S. Bailey
Prenatal Ethanol Exposure Impairs Performance On Spatial And Tactile Sequential Discrimination Task In Juvenile Rats, Caleb S. Bailey
Theses and Dissertations--Psychology
Fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASDs) are a set of cognitive and behavioral abnormalities that arise in ~5% of children who have been prenatally-exposed to alcohol. Prenatal alcohol exposure (PAE) can cause impairments in learning acquisition, working memory, response inhibition, and attentional-set shifting that result in exaggerated deficits in executive function and impairments in goal-seeking behavior. There are standard procedures used in rodent research to address some components of these deficits, but few procedures are sensitive enough to comprehensively assess such deficits. To address this issue in FASDs research techniques, we developed a procedure that requires prolonged executive function in a …
When Brain Stimulation Backfires, Sarah Beth Bell
When Brain Stimulation Backfires, Sarah Beth Bell
Theses and Dissertations--Psychology
tDCS brain stimulation does not always work in the intended direction. It has been found to sometimes worsen behavior rather than improve it. A preliminary study shows that people high on sensation-seeking and lack of premeditation were prone to reverse effects of tDCS on performance on a Stop Signal Task. Both of these constructs are related to dopamine levels. Study 2 seeks to intentionally cause a reverse effect of tDCS by increasing participants’ dopamine levels via caffeine. There was not a significant interaction between tDCS and caffeine on errors on the Stop Signal Task in this study. However, other factors …
Development Of An Avian Model For Identifying Individual Differences In Drug Vulnerability, Beth A. Rice
Development Of An Avian Model For Identifying Individual Differences In Drug Vulnerability, Beth A. Rice
Theses and Dissertations--Psychology
The attribution of incentive salience to cues that become associated with drugs of abuse is a critical characteristic of individuals who may be vulnerable to drug addiction. Rodents with the propensity to sign track are thought to be vulnerable to drug abuse. The goal of the current work was to investigate whether sign trackers (STs) would acquire cocaine conditioned place preference (CPP) to a discrete cue using an avian species. In Experiment 1, sign and goal trackers (GTs) were first identified using a one third rank order split. Following identification, cocaine-CPP was conducted with a discrete cue in each end …