9871186 With instrumentation provided by the National Science Foundation Drs. Marcia Johnson, Jonathan Cohen and Charles Gross will establish a Center for Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience (CCBN) at Princeton University. The Center will focus on understanding the brain mechanisms underlying the cognitive and motivational processes that control behavior, as well as the development of new methods for cognitive neuroscientific research. Research at all levels, from the molecular to the behavioral, will explore the brain mechanisms and subsystems underlying higher cognitive functions (such as attention, memory and decision making), and the closely-related affective processes that govern reward and motivation. Of central interest are the ways in which normal behavior is controlled by higher level goals and regulated by states of arousal, motivation and reward, as well as the ways in which these systems can fail. The Center will couple methods developed during one hundred years of research in physiological and cognitive psychology with important new technologies for investigating the brain. This combination promises to open the way to understand functions of the mind once considered intractable, such as how consciousness and thought emerge from the underlying structures of the brain, what biological systems control emotion and behavior, and what chemical, structural and functional anomalies underlie cognitive deficits and psychopathologies. Several complementary approaches will be employed: fMRI and Event-related Potential (ERP) will be used to examine the structure and function of the brain in conscious human subjects performing cognitive tasks designed to analyze higher mental processes. The separate activity of each of multiple brain cells can be measured. Likewise the expression of particular molecules in individual brain cells as a result of engaging in a specific behavior will also be determined. Two closely related laboratories will be included in the CCBN. An Im aging and Modeling Facility (IMF) will house staff and equipment for the analysis of data sets obtained from fMRI and human electrophysiological studies, and for support of neural network simulation modeling. It will also provide facilities for on site ERP, eye movement and pupilometric recording. During the initial phase of Center development, fMRI data will be gathered at a site less than a mile from the Princeton campus and through collaborations with investigators at other institutions. A closely related Neurotechnology (NTF) Facility will support research at the cellular, molecular and biochemical level. The facility will house modern equipment necessary to conduct analyses of neural substrates of behavior at all of these levels in a variety of mammals, from rodents to primates. Central to proposed research at the IMF is a SGI Symmetric Multiprocessor and associated workstations, microcomputers, networking and software. ERP and eye movement recording equipment, including a Neuro Scan 128 channel SYN-AMPS will also be purchased. A Nikon PCM 2000 confocal microscope system and related computer software will be acquired for use by the NTF. Both graduate and undergraduate students will have access to the laboratories and the instrumentation therefore will serve important educational and training functions.
