Spotlight

Summer 2007                                                                  Back to Spotlight home page

WOW! The sensation of discovery: faculty research and creativity

By Cathy Grover

As an undergraduate and graduate student in the master's experimental psychology program at ESU in the mid 1980s, I had the good fortune of being mentored in the rat lab by Dr. Stephen F. Davis (now renamed the Davis Lab in his honor). In those early years, I learned a great deal about scientific methodology and experimental research by investigating taste aversion learning with rats. Subsequently, as a student in the doctoral experimental psychology program at Texas A&M I became interested in the effects of environmental pollutants on drug-related behaviors and was fortunate to have an excellent research mentor, Dr. Jack Nation. 

Today, I continue the tradition of teaching and mentoring my undergraduates and graduate students in the rat lab. My students and I use rats to study the effects of drugs (e.g., alcohol, caffeine) and/or environmental pollutants (e.g., the ubiquitous heavy metal lead) on social behavior, learning, attention, memory, etc. Much of how drugs and environmental toxicants interact and affect behavior is still unknown, so we hope our research findings contribute pieces to the puzzle.

However, the primary purpose of the research in my lab is to facilitate my students’ enthusiasm and skills in the pursuit of knowledge about behavior and mental processes through scientific investigation. Therefore, I encourage my students to design projects related to their own interests. For example, graduate student Jennifer Peterson is interested in determining how sleep deprivation affects learning in different aged individuals. She is training her young and older rats to press one of two levers to receive food in an operant box, and then she places the rats in a multiplatform chamber on either an acute or a chronic sleep deprivation schedule. For 30 minutes each day during the rats’ sleep deprivation she measures the number of lever presses while the rats learn to switch from their trained lever to the other lever for food reward. This type of reversal learning is quite common among human experiences, and perseveration on a task that no longer leads to reward is a maldadaptive behavior.

Other examples include graduate student Tyler Miller’s investigation of the differential effects of prenatal ethanol exposure on aging rats in a runway learning task, and undergradute Christine Yates’ honors thesis investigating the effects of social/isolated housing and fetal ethanol exposure on operant reversal learning. Christine will begin a doctoral program in Experimental Psychology - Behavioral Neuroscience at the University of Southern Carolina in August of 2007. Jen and Tyler will both apply to doctoral programs in the fall. Their expeinces in the Davis lab provide them with a solid foundation in scientific study of behavior and the skills necessary to continue doing research at the doctoral level.     

Last Updated April 17, 2008