If you are a graduate or an undergraduate student and are interested in doing a lab rotation or independent research project in my lab,read the following description of projects currently underway and come see me if you would like to participate in any of them. All human studies involve normal adults, typically between 18-50 years of age and recruited from UCSD or the surrounding population at large. Please read Guidelines for Human Subject Research for information on how to utilize our human subject pool. Because these are rather specific serotonergic agents, we are exploring the role of this system in a variety of cognitive activities, including disengaging, moving, and engaging attention, memory, as well as responding to novel events. ERPS One of the most frequently given reasons for cigarette smoking, as reported by smokers, is their perception that smoking enhances learning, memory, and attention.
Cigarettes contain nicotine which binds to nicotinic receptors in the brain.
These receptors are normally activated by acetylcholine. The goal of this project is to examine the role of the cholinergic system in cognition in normal individuals by manipulating its activity through smoking, nicotine patches, nicotine gum, and other commonly used methods. This project is examining the electrophysiology of decision making using the Iowa Gambling task in both normals and nicotine users. Most addiction therapies have very low success rates. Our interest is to develop fast, reliable, and practical software and hardware tools that would allow for the detection of electrophysiological signals that could be used to interact with a computer.