All News

Picking up a spoon to stir your morning coffee seems uncomplicated enough, right? We simply see the object and move our hand until it is close enough to grab it. But how much harder does it become if the object gets smaller or farther away from us? Or what happens when we start using our non-dominant hand? Perhaps most of us could make an educated guess at how much harder it would make the task, but Paul Fitts took it one step further beyond just estimating.

Julia Litzky ’12 doesn’t sleep much, and that annoys her. “I used to be able to run off three hours a night freshman year,” she said, “but now I have to get  five or six.” In between finalizing her acceptance to Dartmouth’s M.D./Ph.D. program, volunteering at the Writing Center and crafting her own metal jewelry, it’s surprising she had time to sleep at all as her time at Hamilton wound down.

Assistant Professor of Psychology Jeremy I. Skipper gave an invited talk in a workshop sponsored by the Experimental Psychology Society (EPS) Jan. 7-8 at University College London. In “Hearing lips and… hands, smiles and print too: How listening to words in the wild is not all that auditory to the brain” he discussed the role of visual contextual cues in the processing of auditory information.

Stone Professor of Psychology Douglas Weldon presented a poster titled “Visual Cortical Evoked Potentials During and After MK-801 Administration in Rats” at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience on Nov. 16 in Washington, D.C.

Assistant Professor of Psychology Jeremy Skipper has been awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to be used for upgrading lab equipment. The equipment is needed for a project to develop a procedure capable of analyzing brain data resulting from naturalistic stimuli for application to 4-D EEG data.

Dean of Faculty Patrick D. Reynolds announced the appointment of two of Hamilton's most outstanding teacher-scholars to endowed chairs. Professor of Biology David Gapp was appointed to the Silas D. Childs Chair, and Professor of Psychology Jonathan Vaughan was appointed to the James L. Ferguson Chair. Both appointments were effective July 1.

Serotonin is a neurotransmitter linked to aggression, depression, and neuropsychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia. This summer, Anisha Bhanot ’13, Marla Marquez ’14 and Bridget Fitzpatrick ’13 conducted research on two serotonin receptor subtypes in male rats with regard to how different drugs affect each type of receptor. They worked under Douglas Weldon, the Stone Professor of Psychology and director of the Neuroscience Program.

Douglas Weldon, the Stone Professor of Psychology, presented a poster at the International Brain Research Organization’s (IBRO) Eighth World Congress of Neuroscience on July 15, in Florence, Italy. “Effects of Anpirtoline Administration on Acoustic Startle Responses and Sensorimotor Gating in Rats” presented three experiments based on initial work by the poster’s co-author Caroline Briggs ’10 for her senior thesis in neuroscience.

The formation of a synapse, the junction between nerve cells, is one of the most the most important and critical stages of nervous system development, and in many cases improper synapse formation is the underlying cause of neurological disease.  The Lehman Lab has discovered a new gene that appears to encode an enzyme that is expressed as synapses develop in invertebrate and vertebrate nervous systems. This summer four students are working to synthesize four different enzymes to explore the function of this novel gene product.

Language is undoubtedly a fundamental aspect of many human interactions. For this reason, the study of language serves a vital purpose in neuroscience, medicine, and even everyday life. Sarah Kane ’12 and Amanda O’Brien ’13 are spending their summer researching language and the brain under Assistant Professor of Psychology Jeremy Skipper. The group is working to disprove the classical model of language processing and to discover more about how language is processed in the human brain.