The exposure of an organism to environmental hardship along the developmental trajectory is likely to have lasting behavioral, biological and neural consequences, depending on the timing and duration of the exposure. These environmental circumstances may contribute to dysregulation of different systems (sensory, emotional and attentional) and may play a crucial role in the etiology of pathological conditions such as: attention deficits and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
The major brain regions affected in these psychiatric disorders include the hippocampus, amygdala, striatum and prefrontal cortex that also play pivotal roles in executive functions.
Attention is a set of processes apprehended by the nervous system which organizes the sensory inputs in order to generate coordinated behavior. Thus, the attention system serves as a principal gate for various cognitive processes, including social cooperation.
Current examples for research questions:
I. Different types of attention are presumably play differential roles in normal conditions as well as in the etiology of psychiatric disorders. Referring to behavioral, physiological and neural aspects: we ask what is the interplay between different types of attention and environmental conditions (stress, enriched environment)? and how this interplay affects emotional functioning (resiliency, anxiety- or depressive-like behaviors)?
II. Using a computerized cooperation maze that we have developed, we recently began to investigate different elements of social cooperation, such as sensory modalities that are essential for social communication in our rat model. We also have been examining sex differences as well as the inheritance of social cooperation.
In this research, we further aim to tackle several mechanistic questions: What role dominancy plays in social cooperation? Does Methylphenidate (MPH, Ritalin©) affect social cooperation performance through neuromodulatory influences over fronto-striato-cerebellar circuit, and/or thalamo-cortical versus thalamo-striatal pathways?
III. In our physiology room, we can manipulate different environmental conditions such as temperature, humidity, oxygen level, light (350-1400nm), VR stimuli etc. Utilizing electrophysiological recording in behaving rats and parallely EEG-recording and fNIR-spectroscopy, we would like to examine what and how the environmental conditions affect attention and different types of learning processes?