Research Foci Overview

Behavioral Neuroscience

Rosemarie Booze, Steven Harrod, Sandra Kelly, and Charles Mactutus

Basic Neuroscience

Dr. Rosemarie Booze examine gender differences in response to cocaine after HIV-induced neurotoxicity. Dr. Booze is the Bicentennial Chaired Professor of Behavioral Neuroscience, whose work has demonstrated that females are particularly vulnerable to drug usage. In order to investigate biological mechanisms underlying gender differences to HIV infection and psycho-stimulants, students study new classes of neuroprotectants, including Vitamin E and steroids. Students will study drug addiction dependent variables and will perform and learn histological and cellular techniques to study the brain, such as how toxic drugs/proteins alter dopamine receptor populations using a confocal microscope

Neuropharmacology and Behavioral Effects of Nicotine

Students study intravenous effects of nicotine administration and analyze sex differences, including loco-motor activity in animals. Dr. Harrod uses several neurochemical techniques, including immune-histochemistry, confocal microscopy, and receptor binding .His lab includes projects investigating
nicotine-induced sex differences in adult rats. Students examine whether acute and repeated intravenous nicotine or cocaine administration produces sex dependent changes in dopamine transporters and dopamine D1, D2, and D3 receptors in the mesolimbic and nigrostriatal pathways, and how these changes may mediate the expression of nicotine or cocaine–induced sex differences in rats.

Neurobiology of Social Behavior and Fetal Alcohol Syndrome

Dr. Sandra Kellys examines the effects of alcohol on the developing nervous system. The model Dr. Kelly primarily uses in her work involves exposing rats to alcohol using an artificial rearing procedure during a vulnerable early postnatal period, which corresponds to the third trimester in humans with regard to brain growth. This animal model of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome reveals changes in social behavior that are the direct result of the teratogenic effects of alcohol on the nervous system. Students will use this model to investigate the underlying neural and neurochemical impact in brain regions such as the amygdala and prefrontal cortex of stressed, alcohol, or combined treatments, after studying changes in social behavior.

Psychopharmacology

Dr. Charles Mactutus, studies the effects of perinatal cocaine exposure at different times of administration as the independent variable on development of the noradrenergic system. Rats are bred and implanted with an IV port for drug exposure. Students examine the ontogeny of pre pulse inhibition of the auditory startle response during the pre-weanling period using state-of-the art auditory reflex systems in a double wall chamber. To confirm that cocaine-induced changes are due to alteration of the noradrenergic system, drugs such as idazoxan are employed. He also studies the effects of perinatal cocaine exposure on performance in the water maze to examine effects on later spatial memory parameters.

Cognitive Science

Amit Almor, Fernanda Ferreira, Robin Morris, and Doug Wedell. 

Psycholinguistics, Neuroimaging of Language and Language Impairments

students will be involved in one of many ongoing research projects that explore cognitive processes using process tracing methodologies along with neuroimaging methods. By tracking people's eye movements as they follow instructions and answer questions related to a visual display, the student will learn which mental representations become active during the processing of referential expressions such as pronouns (e.g., he, she, it) and fuller definite references (e.g., the man, the seamstress, the car). Dr. Almor’s research has recently evolved to include the use of neuroimaging methods including fMRI and high density ERP.

Psycholinguistics

Dr. Ferreira uses a wide range of psychological methods, including experimentation, psychometrics, and formal modeling to examine basic theories of sentence phonology and syntax. Dr. Ferreira’s experimental approach relies both on behavioral and neural measures, including eye tracking (for measurement of fixations, saccades, and pupil diameter) and the recording of event-related potentials (ERPs). The fundamental aim of her research is to uncover the mechanisms that enable humans to understand and generate language in real time and in cooperation with other cognitive systems.

Reading and Eye Movements

Dr. Morris has used eye tracking to assess the impact of perceptual and cognitive processing variables on reading behavior in skilled readers to better understand fundamentals of reading comprehension, ambiguity resolution, and vocabulary acquisition. In recent years she has applied these methodologies to study special populations, such as readers for whom English is a second language as well as less skilled readers enrolled in adult basic education programs. Students in her lab will develop a better understanding of the complex processes involved in reading.

Judgment and Decision Making

Dr. Wedell studies basic computer based judgment and choice experiments to understand the underlying cognitive, social and affective processes. A theme of this research is that judgment and choice are highly dependent on context. In addition to collecting outcome responses, students in Dr. Wedell’s lab use process tracing techniques to better understand the sequence of information acquisition and its impact on valuation and integration. Students learn to program multimedia stimuli, pictures, music, and videos as part of the rich context used in evaluating judgment and choice. A fundamental aim of the research is to understand the various cognitive processes that lead to changes in evaluations and choices with context.

Cognitive Neuroscience and Developmental Neuroscience

John Henderson, Melanie Palomares, John Richards, Jeff Schatz, Svetlana Shinkareva, and Jennifer Vendemia. 

Cognitive Neuroscience of Attention and Visual Cognition

Laboratory of Dr. John Henderson, students study how information about the visual world is acquired, identified, retained in memory, and manipulated by the cognitive system to support thought and to guide behavior. Professor Henderson, who is the Chair of the Psychology Department, uses converging evidence from a variety of methods, including behavior (especially eye tracking), computational modeling, and neuroimaging. The research involves understanding the representations and processes associated with visual selective attention (both covert and overt), scene recognition, visual short- and long-term memory, the interaction of cognition and perception, and the integration of vision and language. Two general themes guide this research: vision as an active process, and vision in naturalistic scenes. The goal of this work is to understand how the brain comes to know and understand the visual world.

Child Perception and Attention

Laboratory of Dr. Melanie Palomares, students explore basic developmental changes in perceptual and attentional task performance in children and young adults. In addition to the use of basic psychophysical methods, Dr. Palomares’ lab employs visual evoked potentials VEPs, are neural responses measured on the scalp surface. In addition to normal development, Dr. Palomares investigates development in specific populations, such as Williams’ Syndrome children and children with Fragile X. Basic cognitive tasks being studied include: Face perception, enumeration, statistical representation of sets, texture discrimination, and visual processes of reading.

Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience of Attention

Laboratory of Dr. John Richards, students will track attention based changes in human infants from 2 to 6 months of age. Many of these projects include the monitoring of heart rate, so that heart rate measures may be used to define and evaluate the different stages of attention in the infant. In addition, many of Dr. Richards’ projects include the use of high density EEG/ERP recording system during infant attention processing. Students learn to run subjects, use programs for automatic editing of heart rate periods, respiration and EEG, and also they learn specialized programs for organizing and analyzing these complex data sets. Recent projects have also included the extensive imaging of infant brains (while asleep in the MRI) for better understanding of anatomical changes that develop across infancy.

Cognitive Neuropsychology

Dr. Jeff Schatz examines the relationships between brain structures and overall brain function by measurements of cognitive abilities, high density EEG/ERP analysis, and analyses of structural MRI. Dr. Schatz’s primary population of interest is children with sickle cell induced brain damage, who are studied with healthy school-age children serving as controls. The emphasis is on paradigms of the cognitive neuroscience of attention processes through the use of structural MRI scans and EEG/ERP. Dr. Schatz is a cognitive neuroscientist who brings broad interests and expertise in developmental and neuropsychological research provides students with an opportunity to compare cognitive development in normal and special populations.

Quantitative Methods in Neuroimaging

Dr. Svetlana Shinkareva, sttudies how the brain organizes and represents information about word meaning. She employs functional neuroimaging (fMRI) and a diverse set of quantitative methods to study how words and word categories are represented in the brain. Dr. Shinkareva has extensive data sets from imaging studies that students will learn to analyze using MatLab, a sophisticated statistical programming language. These studies include how the neural signature of words differs as a function of concreteness, affective valence, and moral implications. Students in her lab also learn to apply meta-analytic techniques to examine the neuroimaging literature and learn to run fMRI procedures in her ongoing experiments. 

Cognitive Neuroscientific Detection of Deception Laboratory

Students study the neural and cognitive processes underlying deception using a wide variety of techniques. Her studies include paradigms in which participants lie or tell the truth about mock crimes (e.g., “Did you take the money from the desk?”), autobiographical events (e.g., “Were you born in Tennessee?”), and generic information (e.g., “Is the grass green?”). Students looking at ERPs related to deception using a 128 electrode cap for studying high-density event-related potentials. Students may also work on projects that examine fMRI activation related to deception at the Palmetto RMH facility. This research can involve all SRECBS students, who can get valuable experience serving as participants in an fMRI study (and receive a CD with the MRI of their brains!).

Quantitative Psychology

Amanda Fairchild, Patrick Malone, Svetlana Shinkareva, Lee Van Horn, John Richards, Doug Wedell, Brian Habing

Quantitative Area Webpage. Information About QuantitativeQuantitative psychologists in the department develop and apply methodology and statistics. The collaboration between quantitative research and other areas in psychology builds synergy in the department. For example, statistical research in the area of neuro-imaging benefits from relationships with cognitive neuroscientists utilizing neuroimaging techniques, and vice versa. Quantitative faculty teach undergraduate and graduate level courses in methodology and statistics as well as in substantive areas of interest.

Mediation Analysis

Dr. Fairchild earned her Ph.D. in Quantitative Psychology from Arizona State University and joined the USC faculty in 2008. Her work centers on the development of quantitative methods for the study of physical and psychological health-related behaviors. Much of this work has centered on mediation analysis, or the investigation of third variables that elucidate the relation between predictors and dependent variables, and moderation analysis, or the investigation of third variables that characterize contextual effects. Dr. Fairchild also has interest in the validity and reliability of measurements, as well as effect size measures. She has co-authored general review articles on mediation (e.g., Fairchild & McQuillin, in press; MacKinnon, Fairchild, & Fritz, 2007; MacKinnon & Fairchild, 2009), as well as published more technical pieces on various aspects of the mediation model for use in substantive research (e.g., Fairchild & MacKinnon, 2009; Fairchild, MacKinnon, Taborga, & Taylor, 2009). The substantive outlet of her research focuses on prevention and intervention work, where the mechanisms through which programs achieve behavior change and the identification of what program elements are successful in achieving change can be investigated

Orgins and Prevention of Substance Abuse

Patrick S. Malone. Dr. Malone earned his Ph.D. in Social Psychology from the University of Texas at Austin in 1993. At that time, his work focused primarily on cognitive processes involved in processing social information. He also completed a strong doctoral minor in methodology and statistics. From 1996 to 2007, Dr. Malone conducted primarily quantitative work (both data analysis to meet project needs and original quantitative research) with various federally-funded research projects at Duke University. He joined the USC Psychology faculty in Fall, 2007.

Dr. Malone's current focus is on data analytic methods for use in the study of origins and prevention of youth substance use and abuse (alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, and other drugs). This work involves a number of areas of statistical methods: principally longitudinal methods for studying development over time, but also methods for analyses in the context of missing data and latent variable methods. He has also published research on the effects of divorce on children's behavior, the antecedents of youth behavioral problems, and the effects of reading tutoring for children with attention problems.

Dr. Malone's work is funded by a K01 Mentored Research Scientist Development Award from the National Institute on Drug Abuse to pursue advanced training in statistical methods for the study of youth substance use and abuse. He is a member of the Prevention Science & Methodology Group and the Parenting Across Cultures Working Group.

Link to personal webpage and full CV

Family, School, and Community Contextual Effects on Development

Dr. Van Horn was trained as a Developmental Psychologist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and worked for over 3 years as a Research Scientist at the University of Washington before joining the USC faculty in 2004. Dr. Van Horn’s methodological research interests involve methodology for understanding the effects family, school, and community contexts on development. He has published papers on the measurement of family resources, community risk factors, developmentally appropriate practices, and children’s social skills. His current research emphasis is on understanding how contextual effects differ between individuals. Funded by an R01 research grant from the National Institute of Child Heath and Human Development he is investigating the use of regression mixture models for examining differences in the effects of contexts on development.

A second related area of Dr. Van Horn’s research concerns methodology for assessing the impacts of group randomized trials (GRTs), intervention trials in which groups (such as schools or communities) rather than individuals are randomized into treatment and control communities. He is currently a co-investigator on a large GRT being conducted at USC, and has co-authored papers comparing the power of different statistical models for assessing intervention effects in GRTs. Dr. Van Horn also has a research proposal currently under review that would focus on developing methodology for assessing differential effects in GRTs.