Douglas Weldon, Stone Professor of Psychology, presented a poster in Atlanta at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience with Carlyn Patterson '06 and Erica Colligan '06. The poster was titled "Neuron Activity in the Rat Superior Colliculus during Reward Magnitude Task Performance." The paper showed that some neurons in the midbrain of the rat show cellular activity that differs when the animals retrieve high versus low reward. The context of the work is that this area of the brain is known to be involved in sensory processing and in generating visuo-motor orientations and is thereby thought to be involved in the neural basis of attention. The data are meaningful in suggesting that the brain area participates in processing information about significant events.
Christina Nemeth '06 and Avery Rizio '09 were also co-authors of the poster, but they did not attend the meeting. Patterson, Nemeth and Colligan were all neuroscience concentrators.
The contributions of Nemeth and Colligan to the project were made when they engaged in summer research in 2005. Rizio participated in the STEP/Dreyfus Research Program on campus, enabling her to conduct research during the summer preceding her first year. Patterson generated data for the project as a Hamilton College Senior Fellow.
