colby psychology | behavioral neuroscience lab


Neural Plasticity and Behavior The primary goal of the neuroscience lab is to understand the lifelong interplay between brain and behavior. We strive to learn more about this provocative relationship by designing and conducting studies that are rooted in the following kinds of questions: What are the underlying neural systems and mechanisms that support behavioral change? What impact do behavior and experiences have on neural structure and function? Do the answers to these questions change depending on biological sex, age, or past experiences, good or bad?

You Are What You Eat One focus in the lab is on how dietary choline intake at different stages over the lifespan mediates cognition, anxiety, stress reactivity, and neural function and plasticity. Building on past research showing that prenatal choline supplementation enhances cognition in adult rats and prevents an age-related decline in memory, I recently reported, along with my colleagues at Duke and Boston University, that prenatal choline supplementation produced a marked increase in hippocampal neurogenesis and growth factor content (Glenn et al., 2007); this effect was also found in very old rats (Glenn et al., in press). In the neuroscience lab here at Colby we have begun to look at how choline supplementation is neuroprotective against a variety of acute and chronic stressors and are doing so in rats that are supplemented prenatally, in adolescence, or in adulthood. We are also beginning to examine whether choline deficiency may render rats more vulnerable to stressful challenges.

Painfully Shy Another line of research in the lab is to explore individual differences in rats to search for behavioral characteristics that may be predictive of their response to environmental factors, like chronic stress or enrichment. Work by Sonia Cavigelli at Penn state reveals that rats identified as neophobic early in life based on their exploration of a large open field are more physiologically reactive to acute stress and die sooner than rats identified as neophilic. A new collaboration with Sonia is in the works, but in the meantime a new study in the lab is looking at the neural, physiological, and behavioral responses of rats identified before weaning as neophobic or neophilic to chronic stress.

"The moment a child is born, the mother is also born. She never existed before. The woman existed, but the mother, never. A mother is something absolutely new." - Rajneesh As a third line of research, we have been investigating the ways in which motherhood in rats confers lasting behavioral and neural effects upon the female. I previously found, along with my collaborators at Duke University, that female rats that undergo pregnancy and rear a litter of pups have better spatial working memory and increased hippocampal neurogenesis than age-matched virgin females. We also found that the effects of motherhood on neurogenesis were not supported by litter rearing alone as virgin females that fostered a litter of pups failed to show any change in neurogenesis. New research in the neuroscience lab here has been exploring whether there are behavioral characteristics that can be identified prior to maternal experience that may predict the kinds of changes, and their persistence, a female may undergo.