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Department of Psychology

Laboratory

The Drug Abuse Research Lab (DARL).

DARL is committed to engaging undergraduates in meaningful research experiences. Two current members have received Undergraduate Research Grants from Psi Chi, the National Honor Society in Psychology, Four have received summer stipends from BU Special Emphasis Grants, and Four have presented data at National Conferences. Currently, DARL is pursuing two main research objectives. The first is to establish the behavioral and molecular consequences of environmental enrichment. Broadly speaking, enrichment has been shown to promote enduring changes in spontaneous locomotor activity and various learning tasks. These adaptations have been linked to alterations in the dopamine system. Our goal is to characterized the effects of enrichment during development on subsequent cocaine self-administration behavior, learning and impulse control in a T-maze task, and expression of dopamine-sensitive proteins in the nucleus accumbens and prefrontal cortex. The second main objective is to compare the effects of continuous infusion versus intermittant injections of methylphenidate on similar mesures in a model of ADHD.

The lab currently includes 7 active members, many of which will be presenting their research findings at the Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting in Washington D.C. in November.

Rick Griggs ('09), Dianna Taylor ('08), Wes Wayman ('09) and Corey Weir ('09) at the FUN poster session at the SFN Annual Meeting in San Diego, CA in November, 2007.

Selected Publications.

Koeltzow and Vezina (2005). Locomotor activity and cocaine-seeking behavior during acquisition and reinstatment of operant self-administration behavior in rats. Behavioral Brain Research 160(2): 250.

Koeltzow and White (2003). Behavioral depression during cocaine withdrawal is associated with decreased spontaneous activity of ventral tegmental area dopamine neurons. Behavioral Neuroscience 117(4): 860.

Koeltzow, Xu, Cooper, Hu, Tonegawa, Wolf and White (1998). Alterations in dopamine release but not autoreceptor function in dopamine D3 receptor mutant mice. Journal of Neuroscience 18(6):2231.