Previous Seed Grant Winners
Where are they now?
In 2002, Nancy Squires of the Department of Psychology was awarded a seed grant for her proposal, "Optimizing Functional Neuroimaging Techniques to study the Psychological Mechanism underlying Violence in Cocaine Addiction."
Using results of the study that was funded by the seed grant, the team was able to use fMRI, ERP, and neuropsychological tools to provide evidence for the involvement of the striato-thalamo-orbitofrontal circuit in impaired relative reward processing and inhibitory control in cocaine addicted human subjects. Thus, high reward was associated with higher ERP P300 peak amplitudes in controls, implicating intact automatic stimulus emotional evaluation processing. Similarly, the fMRI results were accompanied by linear increases in self-reported interest, excitement, and value of the higher reward in the control subjects. In contrast, 50% of the cocaine subjects rated all monetary rewards as equally important, i.e., there were no relative gradations in the value of the different amounts of money, nor were there graded neural responses including P300 amplitude changes that were modulated by reward. These results suggest that drug-related rewards in drug addicted individuals are assigned a constant (and not relative) reward value, possibly reflecting a functional change in the orbitofrontal cortex. Together, the seed grant allowed the team to map the involvement of the striato-thalamo-orbitofrontal circuit in the assumed core behavioral characteristics of drug addiction and extend these results to the study of aggression. In the latter they have shown involvement of a similar circuit (e.g., anterior cingulate) in the processing of salient negative stimuli.
The seed grant has led to the following additional funding: 1) National Alliance for Research in Schizophrenia and Affective Disorders Young Investigator Award to the co-PI (7/03-6/05), to study comorbid depression in cocaine addiction; and 2) Laboratory Directed Research and Development grant from U.S. DOE to implement simultaneous ERP and fMRI at BNL. Note that several other grant applications are pending and that several manuscripts directly related to this grant, are now submitted.
This grant also strengthened the collaboration between the SBU psychology department and BNL medical research department in the form of undergraduate and graduate student training (for a total of 5 students to date) and in hiring a post-doctorate fellow who successfully translated principles learned at SBU to current lab’s goals.